Italy Puglia cooking classes and wine tours

 What a fun day today! I and Marika made orecchiette fresh pasta with our Nonna and Mamma! Orecchiette pasta is the typical pasta course we have on a Sunday lunch. Usually our Grandmother prepares orecchiette. Because today was a special holiday (we celebrate the All Saints day) and all our family was getting together, I, Marika and our Mom went to help our Nonna.

We started making the orecchiette at 9am so that the pasta had enough time to dry before lunch (usually our Nonna starts making pasta at 7am!!…but it would have been a bit too early for us).

In Italian, “orecchietta” means little ear.
There is no other way to make the authentic orecchiette pasta, than by using a blunt-ended knife, a wooden board and….. your thumb! No machine please!! and no other sort of kitchen tools to make the typical “hat” shape.

The shape of the orecchiette pasta is completely different depending on if you are in the North (Bari area) or in the South (Lecce area) of Puglia.

In the Lecce area, we eat the orecchiette with the tomato sauce (made with basil) and the cacioricotta cheese (either goat or sheep). Therefore the orecchiette look like hats, because we want to collect as much tomato sauce as we can! And people who took our cooking classes know how good our tomato sauce can be!!

In the Bari area, orecchiette are eaten with Rape (which look like Broccoli, but are a bit more bitter) and anchovies. Therefore, orecchiette are flatter.

The size of the orecchiette pasta is completely different from town to town, even 3 km apart!

Of course, the traditional hand made orecchiette are made with durum wheat mixed with some rye flour. The dough is a little bit harder to work, but the resulting pasta has so much more flavor and a fantastic texture!!

The fact that eating durum wheat pasta is so healthy (Marika, as a Cardiologist, confirms!), ….did not make us feel guilty when we served big portions of orecchiette today at lunch.