No it isn’t a new pizza restaurant. It’s an authentic Italian pasta dish from Lombardia in the Italian Alps near the border of Switzerland. The white Nebbiolo is a very unfamiliar Italian wine varietal from the same region. More details later about that.
I am not a restaurant reviewer. I have a number of friends who own or manage local restaurants and love them all for different reasons, so I’ll leave the official reviews to Jean Le Boeuf. I am not a wine critic but enjoy drinking it and know what I like, so I’ll leave the critiques to Robert Parker and my friends in the wine trade who do a really great job at that. I am however a life long lover of delicious food that looks appealing and served attractively with attention paid to the details. Having spent my whole working career in the business of institutional food service management, I know that macaroni and cheese and pizza can and should be top quality just the same as the most perfectly prepared filet mignon.
When some of our wine and foodie friends recently decided to host a wine and food pairing event featuring lesser known Italian wine varietals, I latched on to the idea as an opportunity to learn about some new and authentic food and wine. Several months ago, we had the opportunity to taste some wines from the Valtellina region of northern Italy. One of them was a white Nebbiolo made from the Nebbiolo red grape varietal which the locals call Chiavennasca in Valtellina in the far north of Lombardy. Sounded like the perfect lesser known varietal to contribute to our friends event! The wine was Pietro Nera Chiavennasca Bianco La Novella Terrazze Retiche di Sondrio with white fruit notes and a dry finish.
Now that we had a wine, next step was to find some authentic food to pair with it. As is often said, what grows together goes together. So off I went in Google search of what they eat in Valtellina! The area is very rustic and mountainous where comfort food is key. One pasta often eaten in the area is pizzocheri which is made from buckwheat. It seems that Valtellinians often eat their buckwheat pasta cooked with potatoes and greens. This mixture wasn’t sounding good to me, but I decided that to stick with my desire to get the details right, I would try my best to make it authentic beginning with ordering the pasta from New York as it didn’t seem to exist in Fort Myers.
Pasta arrived in just a few days and next step was to do a practice run. I could tell my practice dish was not well received by my husband, so I knew I would have to kick it up a notch! The final ramped up version was Pizzoccheri pasta cooked with tiny cubes of potatoes and rainbow Swiss chard. Here is an important cooking tip—–be sure to liberally salt the cooking water. The potatoes and pasta require it!!
The cooked and drained pasta and veggies got a heavy layering with a blend of Gruyere, Fontina and Grana Padano cheeses drenched with a garlic sage brown butter and a dusting of fresh grated nutmeg. The cheeses oozed over the hot pasta and become very lasagna-like and ended up as a delicious and authentic dish to pair with our wine.
Next up……..Torta Barozzi ! A very special Italian dessert is enjoyed in the town of Vignola just outside of Modena. Once you try this one layer moist dark chocolate cake full of ground almonds, you will never forget it. It has a meringue-like top and slightly crunchy inside from the almonds. Putting on my Registered Dietitian Nutritionist hat, this cake can be enjoyed by my gluten-free friends. It’s flour-free. The almonds and meringue hold it together. I’ve made a Torta Barozzi several times before and this time decided to add the letter B to the top to be really authentic! Here is a picture of the finished product and the perfect ending to my northern Italian wine, comfort food pasta dish and white Nebbiolo. The buckwheat pasta turned out to be a pleasant surprise to our diners who I am sure were not initially overly enthusiastic about trying it ……..and matched perfectly with the wine. Should you have any thoughts about trying preparing these foods, you can find many different recipe versions on the Internet or ask me for the recipes I used. I am happy to share. Happy cooking. Ciao!
