Pizzoccherone - The last big tortellone

When yesterday I was making a giant tortellone, or maybe just a tortellone (let's hope that Accademia della Crusca contacts me...) with cabbage and cheese, just before biting the first bite, I realized that that stuffing had so much in common with Pizzoccheri that I could make them stuffed.
Pizzoccheri are traditional in Valtellina, and they're made of buckwheat flour and some wheat flour.
I'm very happy that my last gluten-free recipe for pasta worked. And it worked for this, too.

Yield: 6 servings

Dough

• 300gr buckwheat flour
• 150gr potato starch
• 150gr corn starch
• oil
• boiling water

Stuffing

• 500gr mashed potatoes, seasoned with oil and salt to taste
• 150gr cabbage, cut in chiffonade, stir fried with oil and garlic
• 100gr Casera Valtellinese, cut in cubes

Cook in boiling salted water, then add green beans. Here, there's beer sauce, too.

Gluten-free almost for free

If you have read "Modernist Cuisine", you can find plenty of recipes that involve the use of xantham gum and other very interesting products that cost a lot of money.
What I like about pasta, apart from the taste of course, it's that it is cheap. Why would I make a dish that cost me 20 times more when I can find a cheaper solution on the shelves of a normal shop? After all, as they teach in that big book, it's about chemistry.
Let's remember that pasta, as well as pizza (the first version, fried in pork fat on the street corners) was peasants' food. They would have not spent half of their month income to give food to their gluten-intolerant friend. Yet they would have found a solution to feed him or her that would guarantee them to do it again the day after because they could afford it.

My solution is once again starch. This time I mixed potato and corn starch with boiling water and buckwheat flour. I worked the dough very quickly and made a sheet with the rolling pin. Unlike the first time for tortellini, when I found out that a cold dough would be better to work. Of course, the result is different from what I consider as Quality pasta. I've been taught to make the pasta sheet as thin as possible. But compromise sometimes is not a bad concept. In Bologna they say "rather than nothing, it's better rather".

Yield: 4-6 people

Dough

• 300gr buckwheat flour
• 150gr potato starch
• 150gr corn starch
• oil
• boiling water

Stuffing

•  350gr ricotta
• 150gr Gorgonzola
• salt
• pepper 

The stuffing is quite easy to make: mix ricotta and gorgonzola with a fork and some salt and pepper to taste.

Forget about a thin sheet of pasta and put little stuffing on each 6cm wide square.

Close quickly as long as the dough is warm. It will soon become a piece of frail wood.

Boil in salted water and toss in a frying pan with cream.
Grate some Parmigiano or Grana on top and add some walnuts.

Thick as a brick - Almost-gluten-free tortelloni

For U.Eco when we face a text we respond to it by interpreting the pictured world in comparison to the one we live in. It's called the "theory of possible worlds".
I lack of fantasy: I can't imagine a world without pasta. Sometimes I don't even want to hear about it. I don't want to cook it, I'd never make it. But still I could never say "nevermore".
I remember I read once about a study (I can't guarantee how serious it was, I had news of it on a newspaper) that said Italians get depressed if they don't eat pasta for more than a week. Although it is a very stereotypical assessment, there must be some truth in it.

Because I can't think a pasta-less world, I always wonder how to make it eatable for eveybody.

The first week I tried almost successfully to make tortellini with rice flour. Today the flour came from buckwheat and the pasta tortelloni. Still it didn't quite work. I had to make a fix.
When we make a castle with sand on the seashore, we rely on the water to keep the grains stuck together.
Buckwheat flour was the same. As long as it was wet, it was looking smooth. But I couldn't make a sfoglia with it.
So I added some flour (normal) and some water and used the gluten. Again.

Yield: 4-6 people

Dough

• 250gr buckwheat flour
• 150gr flour
•  water

Stuffing

• 4 bananas (more or less 400gr in total)
• 200gr dates (without the seed)

 With a fork, make a paste of the banana. Sprinkle with lemon juice to avoid it darkens.
Cut the dates in small pieces (or mince them if you're in a hurry).

Put the stuffing on 6cm wide squares of pasta. You can't make it thin this time: it would destroy.

Make tortelloni and dust them copiously with the flour.

If you have one, put them on a rack.

 Cook them in lightly salted boiling water.
Toss them in a pan with some oil and some vegetable cream.
Dust them with grated chocolate and coconut powder.

Gluten-free tortellini?

The first time I tried to deal with rice flour, some of the dough got stuck to the rolling pin and the day after the latter was bent forever. I could never use it again.

This is a chronicle of a partial success or that of a partial failure. But we must see the half glass full, right?

My mistake was to use cold water, the first time. I got something in between a rock and wet sand.
Today the water was boiling hot and the flour, although without gluten, managed to become somewhat sticky. I have been reading many recipes about Chinese dumplings and somewhere in the way I got this information.
I'm not sure about the cemical process, I guess the starch becomes somehow a gel and gets easier to be worked.

Yield: max 2 servings (it was an experiment!)

For the dough, I used the following:

• 1 cup of rice flour
• 1 spoon of potato starch
• 1 spoon of sunflower oil
• 1 pinch salt
• 4/5 of a cup of boiling water

Mix the flours, salt and oil in a bowl with a fork. Then pour the water. Stir using the fork, unless you want to spend some time in the hospital with 3rd degree burns.
Once you get a somewhat sticky mass, you can try and use your hands. It will be warm.
Make a ball and cover with plastic foil to avoid it dries.

For the stuffing, I used the vegan one given previously.

Dust the board and, with a rolling pin, make a sheet and cut in 3cm squares.

The dough is very delicate. I broke it straight away in the middle.
I collected the bits around the squares and made another ball, which I worked again with the rolling pin. This time, it was cold and more resistant.
So, make sure the dough has got cold before you make the sheet.
6/10 of a millimeter, as required for traditional tortellini, was too thin a thickness. I managed to close them, but I had less problems with a part that was a couple of millimeters. 

The tortellini I made look extremely delicate on the board. I wonder how to cook them. I guess steaming them would not destroy their delicate skin, or maybe they could be deep-fried. I wonder what happens in the broth.

Next time, I will be more precise.