The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [117]
Cesare’s favorite recipes for bagna caôda; fondo bruno, the wonderful, deeply flavored meat broth he uses in many sauces and soups; and his sugo d’arrosto, that brothlike sauce used in Piedmont with many pastas, follow. First I will give you a fine recipe for tajarin noodles with white truffles, which I have finally got right. The finest way to enjoy white truffles, and no more difficult to make than any other pasta, tajarin are prepared daily in nearly every Piedmontese restaurant I have visited. I have never found them in the United States, even at the most expensive and pretentious Italian restaurants that are proud to serve the first white truffles of the season. The sauce is simple and mild, so that it does not detract from the truffles.
Tajarin al Burro e Salvia con Tartufi Bianchi
All-Egg-Yolk Pasta with Butter, Sage, and White Truffles
White truffles are available between November and late January. Squeeze and smell your truffle before you buy it. Fresh truffles are very firm and aromatic. Spongy truffles are old and tired. Many fans believe that large specimens have a more stupendous taste than little ones. Strong aroma is no guarantee of flavor, but if you know of a fancy-food store that lets you taste your tartufo before paying for it, please let me know.
Tajarin is Piedmontese dialect for the most rich and delicious tagliarini noodles made with egg yolks instead of the whole eggs used in the rest of Italy (though some Piedmontese cooks mix yolks and whole eggs). They are best consumed after your routine cholesterol test, not before. In Alba they are rolled with a wooden dowel and hand-cut an eighth inch wide. I have found nothing like them, fresh or dried, in any pasta store I know. The Piedmontese refer to the “red” of an egg, not the yellow, because their egg yolks are orange-red and their tajarin are a deep golden color. Yours will be paler.
Hand-rolled noodles are generally made with unbleached white flour rather than semolina because its high gluten content makes semolina hard to work by hand. The method given here uses a pasta-rolling machine for thinning the dough and a knife for cutting it into noodles. If you are good at hand-rolling pasta, which I am not, by all means try it; the results will be lighter and more tender. But remember that hand-rolling is not like making pie pastry. The dough must be stretched, not compressed, into a thin sheet. If your hand-rolling technique merely compresses the dough, you may as well use a machine. Those expensive square white electric pasta extruders with the plastic templates are completely out of bounds.
The sauce combines butter browned with sage, uncooked butter used for its fresh taste, and just enough Parmesan and meat broth to add a savory undertone that intensifies the taste of the white truffle. If you can easily identify the Parmesan or the meat broth, you have used too much.
1 pound unbleached white flour
Salt
20 yolks from extra-large eggs
12 tablespoons sweet butter, softened at room temperature
12 large sage leaves, roughly chopped, plus 6 to 8 more for decoration
Freshly ground white pepper
1 tablespoon well-packed freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons meat broth (Cesare’s recipe is given on this page)
2 ounces white truffles
Put all but 1 cup of the flour on the counter (or, into a wide shallow bowl, if you are wary of repeating my disastrous first try), sprinkle with a half tablespoon of salt, make a depression in the center, and pour in the egg yolks. Stir the yolks with a fork, gradually incorporating all the flour that surrounds them, until you have a sticky mass of dough. With the reserved cup, heavily flour your hands and work surface, and knead the dough, adding flour as necessary, until you have a smooth, soft ball that no longer sticks to your fingers. Cover it with a towel and let it relax for 30 minutes. You can also use a food processor until the dough forms