Garganelli: Homemade Pasta

Name: Garganelli: Homemade Pasta Recipe with Meat and Vegetables
Prep time: 45 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 1 h
Cuisine: Italian cuisine
Ingredients: Durum wheat flour semola di grano duro 200 g; Eggs 2; Water 1 tbsp (if the dough is too stiff); Flour for dusting as needed; Olive oil 1 tbsp; Ham or bacon 100 g; Pancetta 50 g; Hot pepper 1; Dry white wine 0.5 cup (100 ml); Fresh thyme 4-5 sprigs; Salt to taste; Water for boiling 2.5 l; Salt for boiling 18 g (7 g per 1 l of water); Cherry tomatoes 8; Basil 1 sprig

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Homemade garganelli pasta is surprisingly easy to make. It is a simple kind of Italian egg pasta that looks a lot like the very common penne tubes. Like fettuccine and lasagna, this pasta is easy to make at home with a simple hand-cranked pasta machine. As a rule, it is made right before boiling and is not dried.

Making this pasta is extremely simple. Like the vast majority of Italian pastas, garganelli is made from durum wheat flour. This flour is sold in shops, and it costs no more than good-quality dried pasta. The package says semola di grano duro. A firm dough with eggs is rolled out, and the ridged pasta tubes are shaped with a special little board, a fork or a woven mat.

By looks, this pasta is hard to tell from penne. But if you look closely, there are important differences. First, homemade garganelli is a small square of dough rolled diagonally into a tube, with an overlap, while penne is simply a tube pushed out by a press. Second, the diagonally cut tips of penne, which look like a goose quill for writing, are on opposite sides relative to the axis of the pasta. Third, because of the overlap, the wall thickness of garganelli is uneven.

This kind of pasta is typical of the Emilia-Romagna region, whose center is Bologna. You can often find pasta like this there. I read somewhere that this pasta appeared in the 15th century at the court of Girolamo Riario, ruler of Imola and Forlì. Or, which sounds more likely, there is the “usual” legend of a kitchen mishap that happened on the eve of 1725 in the house of Cardinal Cornelio Bentivoglio d’Aragona, papal legate of Romagna, which gave rise to this shape of pasta.

As a rule, homemade garganelli is served with dry-cured ham, prosciutto or duck ragù, or generously sprinkled with Parmesan. It is also served in broth and with truffles.

The homemade pasta dough can be made ahead and keeps well in the fridge, although fresh dough is preferable. Grated Parmesan is often added to the dough, and so are spices; nutmeg underlines the refinement of the pasta. If you don’t have the special tools that make shaping the pasta extremely easy, you can roll the dough with a rolling pin, shape the pasta around an ordinary stick, and make the ridges with whatever is at hand, for example a grater.

Ingredients

2 servings

Durum wheat flour semola di grano duro 200 g
Eggs 2
Water 1 tbsp (if the dough is too stiff)
Flour for dusting as needed

Olive oil 1 tbsp
Ham or bacon 100 g
Pancetta 50 g
Hot pepper 1
Dry white wine 0.5 cup (100 ml)
Fresh thyme 4-5 sprigs
Salt to taste

Water for boiling 2.5 l
Salt for boiling 18 g (7 g per 1 l of water)
Cherry tomatoes 8
Basil 1 sprig

Step-by-step recipe

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Dough

As a rule, no salt or other additions are used in pasta dough.

Mix the flour with the eggs. Be sure to sift the flour so that no lumps or anything else that may be in it get into the dough. Pour the flour into a large bowl and make a well. Break two chicken eggs into the well and make sure no bits of shell get in. By the way, if the eggs are large, you can use one egg and the yolk of the second. If the dough turns out too stiff, you can add 1 tbsp of water.

Knead the dough as usual. You can adjust the consistency of the dough by adding flour. The flour does not have to be durum wheat, and you won’t need much. The dough for homemade garganelli is smooth and should not stick to your hands, yet it should not knead without considerable effort. Roll the dough into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for 15-20 mins.

Shaping the garganelli

Prepare the tools. You will need a rolling pin or a pasta machine, a completely universal tool for dough that is handy and functional. You will also need an ordinary pizza cutter. To make the pasta uniform, cut a template out of thick cardboard, a strip 4-5 cm wide. And if you have one, you need a board with a ridged surface, which can be replaced by anything that lets you form ribs or ridges.
Roll out the dough and cut it into squares. Divide the dough into several parts. So it doesn’t dry out, work with one small piece and keep the rest under plastic wrap. Gradually reducing the gap between the rollers of the pasta machine, roll out a sheet about 1 mm thick. Using the template and the pizza cutter, cut the dough into strips, trimming off the uneven edges.
Cut all the dough into squares of the same size. The length of homemade garganelli is the diagonal of the square and depends on the width of the dough strips. If the dough is cut 4 cm wide, the pasta will be 5.5-5.6 cm long; with 3 cm, it will be 4.2-4.3 cm.
Shape the tubes. Wrap each square of dough diagonally around the stick that comes with the board, or around any wooden stick 10 mm in diameter; in the simplest case a pencil will do. Wrap it so that there is a significant overlap, and roll the dough over any ridged surface. Don’t wrap the dough too tightly, or it will be hard to slide off.
This is easy and even enjoyable work: you get a neat, pretty tube out of a piece of thin dough on the first try. The dough is quite dry, so it doesn’t stick together. Lay all the homemade garganelli tubes on a cloth, a board or just a plate. You don’t even have to dust them with flour.

Sauce

Put a pot with 2.5 l of water and 18 g of salt (7 g per 1 l of water) on high heat. While the water comes to a boil, make the sauce, the addition that will give the dish its flavor. We decided to fry dry-cured pork with a good share of meat: after frying with hot pepper, the sliced meat is briefly stewed with white wine, then mixed with the boiled pasta.
Fry the meat with the pepper and stew with the wine. Cut the piece of meat into thick strips. Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat and fry the meat for 2-3 mins. Remove the seeds and white membranes from the hot pepper and cut it into strips. The amount of hot pepper is up to you; you don’t have to use all of it. Add the pepper to the meat, put in 4-5 sprigs of fresh thyme and pour in half a glass of dry white wine. Stew under a lid over low heat for 10 mins.

Boiling

Carefully add all the garganelli to the boiling water and stir very gently with a spatula, trying not to damage the delicate dough. Freshly made pasta cooks in about 2 minutes from the moment the pieces float up in the boiling water. Taste it to make sure the dough is cooked.
Mix the pasta with the sauce and heat through. Remove the thyme sprigs from the pan. Lift the cooked pasta out of the water with a slotted spoon and transfer it to the pan with the fried and stewed meat. Since ham and cured pork are always salty, add more salt only to taste. Toss the pasta with the meat very gently, literally turning it over. Cover the pan with a lid and let it heat through for 1-2 mins over low heat.

Serving

Pull the basil leaves off the sprigs and chop them coarsely. Mix the pasta with the basil and immediately pile it onto a large plate. Arrange cherry tomatoes, halved or whole, around the edge of the plate. Cut the prosciutto into strips and add it to the plate. Garnish with a few basil leaves.
Serve the homemade garganelli with the sauce of fried meat, then stewed with wine and spices, right away while it is still hot. If you like, the pasta sauce can be anything. Even stewed poultry or a vegetable ragù will do.

Calories and macros

690 kcal

Serving ≈ 310 g

Protein29 g17% of kcal
Fat26 g36% of kcal
Carbs77 g47% of kcal

100 g225 kcalProtein 9.4 gFat 8.6 gCarbs 25.3 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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Garganelli: Homemade Pasta

Ingredients

For the dough

For the sauce

For boiling and serving