March 13, 2002

THE CHEF 
 
Pasta From the Italian Riviera

By ALAIN DUCASSE

I PREFER dry pasta, macaroni, to fresh noodles. One of my favorites is a
short twisted kind called strozzapreti. And I like to cook it the way I
learned from the farm families who have mills for pressing olives for oil
in rural Liguria on the Italian Riviera. They cook pasta like a risotto.
I've been doing it for years now, and I would not cook macaroni any other
way.

What happens is this. You do not boil the pasta in water first. Rather,
you start with some of your seasonings, the ingredients that will make up
your sauce, like olive oil, onions, garlic, tomatoes and herbs.

In Liguria, they also use potatoes and even big white beans. They cook the
beans first, of course.

Once these ingredients have started to soften and perhaps taken on a bit
of color, you add the pasta and stir it around. Then you begin adding
stock, about a cup at a time, stirring everything together.

After 15 or 20 minutes your pasta is cooked and is coated with just enough
sauce — richly concentrated, almost creamy and perfectly seasoned. It is a
sauce that has picked up the flavor of the macaroni and blended it with
your other ingredients. You have taken advantage of the pasta's natural
starch, like the starch in arborio rice when you make risotto.

 
   
  Recipe: Olive Mill Pasta (March 13, 2002) 

You have to use a high-quality hard-wheat pasta, a pasta made with
old-fashioned bronze dies. It's usually labeled "artisanal." That kind of
pasta has the best flavor and also a rougher texture, so it can grab the
sauce. You couldn't cook spaghetti this way, but almost any short-cut
pasta, penne, for example, or gemelli or fusilli, would work.

I've served this pasta at my restaurant in Monte Carlo. But it is really a
modest dish, one that I would make at home and one that the housewives in
Liguria serve as the mainstay of a meal. These women are the keepers of
the best Italian cooking. A preparation like this also illustrates the
deep connection to the actual process and pleasure of preparing food,
something that is essential to me.

You're not just standing there waiting for a big pot of water to boil, and
then waiting for the macaroni to cook, and then applying a sauce. You are
participating every step of the way, stirring, seasoning, reducing the
liquid, enjoying the warmth and aromas around you, trusting your palate
and then sharing what you have prepared with others. It's what I adore
about cooking.

This is the third of eight columns by Alain Ducasse, the chef and owner of
Alain Ducasse at the Essex House in Manhattan. They are being written with
Florence Fabricant.