Bonus Recipe: Tagliatelle alla Chitarra

Rustic egg noodles to go with your favorite sauce

Ciao, and welcome to this bonus Tuesday newsletter, featuring a recipe (and mini video!) for toothsome egg noodles cut on a chitarra.

As I mentioned in Sunday’s Buona Domenica, I had planned to make a batch of spinach tagliatelle (tagliatelle agli spinaci), the traditional pasta that accompanies Ragù alla Bolognese, for my daughter’s birthday. However, when I cooked and puréed the spinach that I bought at the farmers market, I was dismayed to find it had turned muddy and unappealing. I’m not sure if it was the spinach itself, the puréeing, or my blanching that was off. In any case, I was not putting it in my pasta dough. Instead, I went with egg noodles.

You may already know that there are many ways to make pasta all’uovo (egg pasta). You can use whole eggs or just yolks; finely milled (“00”) soft-wheat flour, or heartier hard-wheat flours, or a mix of flours. You can cut your noodles as fine angel hair or as wide as pappardelle. You can cut them by hand, on a pasta machine. In Emilia-Romagna, where Bolognese ragù originated, the traditional egg pasta for this rich sauce is made with soft wheat flour, which yields a silky, delicate noodle. The golden dough is rolled out by hand into a large, thin round using a long pin called a mattarello. The sfoglia (sheet of pasta) is then cut by hand into tagliatelle, about 1/4-inch (6 mm) wide.

However, if your people are from Abruzzo, like mine are, you typically use a mix of soft wheat and durum wheat (semolina) flour to make pasta dough. This produces a sturdier noodle. And, rather than a knife, you use a chitarra to cut your sheets of dough into noodles.