11/5/2022 0 Comments Restaurant city facebook![]() ![]() Scínetti, who follows the Academy's recipe at Ai Tigli, started rolling pizzoccheri dough with only buckwheat flour about five years ago when customers asked for a gluten-free version of the dish. Adding wheat to the dough also supports mass production, creating a more stable pasta that can be dried and cooked later.ĭespite the success and ubiquity of the wheat-inclusive Pizzoccheri di Teglio recipe, interest in buckwheat-only pasta has recently resurfaced. Gluten from the wheat acts as an adhesive, increasing the pasta's durability buckwheat-only mixtures can be more delicate and need to be cooked immediately before they fall apart, Scínetti explained. ![]() "They taste better."įlavour aside, there are practical advantages to using wheat flour in pizzoccheri dough. "You notice the buckwheat more," Maestroni said of buckwheat-only pizzoccheri. Maestroni argues that the addition of wheat to the pizzoccheri recipe has altered the quality and taste of the dish, resulting in the loss of an important culinary tradition. Five independent producers still cultivate and grind buckwheat flour in Teglio, but without the benefit of mass production, their prices are nearly double that of Filippini and Tudori, and thus, they are an unsustainable option for Teglio businesses. Now, relatively little buckwheat is grown in Teglio, and two major Teglio-based commercial mills – Filippini and Tudori – process buckwheat seeds from Eastern Europe and sell the resulting flour to supermarkets and restaurants, including Ai Tigli. In 1616, the governor of what was then called Valle dell'Adda wrote that heidenkorn (buckwheat) was the main crop, and by 1830, the Valtellinese milled more than 1,800 tons of buckwheat per year. Buckwheat easily took root in the region as it was ideally suited to grow in its rocky alpine terrain. Though a report published in 2014 by professors from the University of Florence in partnership with Italian and European agricultural associations, Maestroni learned that seeds for Valtellina's first buckwheat fields likely came from Russia in the 1400s, after Mongolian invaders brought them from Yunnan, China. "I was curious to know when buckwheat arrived here, from where, why, and why people started to cultivate it," explained Maestroni, who traced her Teglio roots and buckwheat cultivation on her maternal Reghenzani side to the 1600s. Buckwheat production declined drastically with the rise of industrialisation in the 1950s and was replaced by more lucrative crops like wheat, which was substituted for some of the buckwheat flour used for making pizzoccheri. Today, however, only 50 acres are farmed, primarily in Teglio. Lehmann noted that farmers living in small homes would also use this same dough to make a simpler, gnocchi dish as they didn't always have the luxury of time or space to roll and cut the dough into flat tagliatelle noodles.īy the end of the 1800s, there were 5,000 acres of buckwheat cultivated in Valtellina. ![]() While it's hard to know when the dish was first made, in the 1799 book Die Republik Graubündent (The Republic of Graubünden), German historian Heinrich L Lehmann wrote about a "perzockel" dough made from buckwheat flour and egg, which was cooked in water and served with butter and grated cheese. Flour ground from the plant's triangular seeds, grano saraceno in Italian, or furmentùn in Valtellina's dialect, was central to a hearty tagliatelle-style pasta dish called pizzoccheri, which was topped with vegetables like cabbage and potatoes, as well as cheese and butter, which fuelled them from dawn to dusk. ![]() Lanzarotti's maternal ancestors, the Tusetti's, settled in Teglio on Valtellina's north side – 16km south of the Italian-Swiss border in Lombardy and 900m above sea level – in the 1600s, and cultivated buckwheat, a traditional food staple for farmers tending their terraced mountain crops. "It's still like a postcard," Lanzarotti said, pointing her cane to the south side of Italy's Valtellina valley, surrounded by the Orobie Alps, which are snow-speckled, even in mid-July. Chiara Lanzarotti remembers when "everyone was a farmer" in the small town of Teglio. ![]()
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