A class with Shamira Gatta

 

I OFTEN DREAMT to make pasta with flours that were not of wheat or traditional grains and the class of chef and food blogger Shamira Gatta was the answer to the quest. She is a real master chef and watching her make pasta out of peas and chickpeas flours was an experience I recommend. The results, by the way, were remarkable too. A few tricks I learned, along with the pleasure to see a professional at work, were that you can make fresh spaghetti, penne and maccheroni or ravioli basically out of any type of legumes that you can first dry and then grind into flour. The second trick I recollected is that the dough, no matter what you use to make it, must rest before you work on it. The more, the better. It will be more elastic and manage it into becoming your favorite kind of pasta will be much easier .

 

THE MENU we had to be confronted with was composed of peas flour tagliatelle, chickpeas flour ravioli filled with potatoes and saffron and cream puffs made of chestnuts flour and filled with ricotta cheese and dark chocolate. A bit of sweet at the end of a hard working class is always to be appreciated…

To make the pasta, Shamira used a machine that is quite common in Italian kitchens, but the quantities I report down here are good even if you want to do it in the traditional way: by hand 🙂

INGREDIENTS (4 persons)

Ravioli stuffed with potatoes and saffron

200 grams chickpeas flour

1 pinch of salt

2 yolks

2 tablespoons of extra virgin  olive oil

water as needed

For the filling

200 grams of potatoes

1 pinch of salt

extra virgin olive oil as needed

black pepper ground at the moment

saffron

 

MIX the chickpeas flour, the egg yolks, the salt, the evo oil and work the dough adding warm water until you have a hard dough, not a sticky one. Let it rest covered in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile boil the potatoes, peal them a mash them in a basin. Add the salt, the oil, the black pepper and the saffron and  mix carefully- Let it rest.

Take the dough out of the fridge and roll out the pastry until it’s quite thin. Cut the pastry in squares of a 5 cm length. Put a teaspoon of filling in each square, fold the pastry over the filling and seal it.

You can easily do this brushing the external side of the pastry with a tiny bit of water before putting the filling on the center.

Make a big pot full of salted water (lightly salted, not really salted) to boil and when the water is babbling drop the ravioli. They will cook in a minute or two (maximum). To drain the ravioli use a skimmer.

Dress the ravioli with your favorite sauce.

We used a sauce of cod  and fresh parsley.

Simple. And delicious 🙂