Ciceri e tria (Pasta and Chickpeas)

Frank18 April 2021pasta, primi piatti, Puglia38 Comments

Here’s a simple dish from Puglia, and more specifically from the Salento, at the very heel of the Italian boot. If you had to sum it up in a couple of words, you’d say ciceri e tria was pasta and chickpeas. And you’d be right, but you’d also be missing out on what makes this dish distinctive.

Tria is the name for a local ribbon shaped pasta, much less known than orecchiette or cavatelli but equally treasured by the Pugliesi. Made from semolina flour and water, tria is often translated as “tagliatelle”, but they are actually quite different. You make them without eggs and cut them into ribbons rather thicker, wider and shorter than tagliatelle. In a word, tria is more “rustic”, with a chewier and more substantial mouthfeel and a pleasantly nutty flavor.

But what makes ciceri e tria really stand out is the cooking technique which is, as far as I know, unique in Italian cookery. You take some of the pasta and, instead of boiling it, you shallow fry it until golden brown. You boil the rest as usual and mix it with simply cooked chickpeas. Then you place the fried tria on top for decoration. The diner mixes things everything together as they tuck into the dish.

The combination of textures—the creamy chickpeas, the chewy boiled tria and crispy fried tria—is a real knock out. No wonder the Pugliesi treasure ciceri e tria as an icon of their regional cookery. What’s surprising is, the dish is so little known elsewhere.

Ciceri e tria are traditional for St. Joseph’s Day on March 19, but it’s a dish you can happily eat year round. It’s just that good.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

To cook the chickpeas:

250g (1/2 lb) dried chickpeas
A medium onion, cut in half
1-2 carrots
1-2 stalks of celery
A bay leaf
A sprig of thyme
Salt

To make the pasta:

300 g (10 oz) finely ground semolina flour (semola rimacinata)
Water
Salt

To finish the dish:

1-2 cloves of garlic, slightly crushed and peeled
1-2 peperoncini or a pinch of red pepper flakes
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
A few cherry tomatoes, split in two (optional)

Directions

Soak the dried chickpeas overnight, ideally 12 hours or more. Drain.

Put the chickpeas in a large pot (traditionally it would be a tall terracotta pot called a pignata) and cover with water by about five fingers. Add the rest of the listed ingredients . Bring to a simmer and cook over gentle heat until the chickpeas are tender. (In the alternative, cook under pressure for 20-30 minutes and let cool naturally.)

Mix the flour and salt, then add in enough water to make a pliable but firm dough. Knead for a good five minutes until you have a perfectly smooth ball of dough. Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest for 15 minutes.

Uncover the pasta and roll it out, but not too thinly, into a sheet or sheets about 3mm thick. (If you’re using a pasta machine or attachment, this corresponds to the 3 setting.) Set aside to dry. When the pasta has dried out enough that it has lost any stickiness, cut the sheets into strips about 10-15 cm/4-6 inches long.

To finish the dish, in a large braiser or sauté pan, gently sauté the garlic and hot pepper until the garlic is just beginning to brown around the edges. If using the cherry tomatoes, add them now and let them melt a bit in the scented oil.

Then, with a slotted spoon, transfer the chickpeas to the scented oil, and turn them to coat them well with the oil. Simmer for a few minutes. Add enough of the chickpeas’ cooking liquid so that the chickpeas are just covered. Continue simmering, crushing some of the chickpeas against the side of the pan so they melt into and thicken the liquid. Taste and adjust for seasoning.

While the chickpeas are simmering. take about 1/3 of the tria and fry them until golden brown in abundant olive oil, in a skillet wide enough to hold them all in a single layer. If need be, proceed in batches. As they brown, transfer the fried pasta to a plate lined with paper towels to drain.

Take the remaining pasta and cook it briefly in well salted water, in the usual manner. Drain the boiled pasta and transfer it to the pan with the simmering chickpeas. Mix everything well, adding another ladleful of the chickpea cooking liquid if things look a bit dry.

Serve, topped with the fried pasta, and serve right away.

Notes on Ciceri e tria

Regular readers know that I don’t object to convenience foods, whether it’s canned beans or frozen vegetables or store bought pasta. But this is one dish you’ll want to make from scratch. Since they have minimal seasoning, the chickpeas themselves need to really shine. And, as you will have read, their cooking liquid is an important part of the condimento for the pasta.

I’d strongly recommend the pasta, too, be homemade. Much of the charm of ciceri e tria lies in the nuttiness and chewiness of the semolina, and you won’t get that from tagliatelle or other store bought pastas. To make the job easier, I use a standing mixer for making the dough, then use attachments for rolling it out and cutting it up into strips. The fettuccine attachment works well, even if fettuccine is a bit narrower than tria typically is. (See my post on homemade pasta for details.)

Speaking of the pasta, be sure to use the finely ground semolina flour called semola rimacinata di grano duro in Italian. Most semolina flour sold here in the US is rather coarsely ground. It’s what you want for making gnocchi alla romana but it’s not ideal for pasta, lending an unpleasant gritty texture to it. I never did understand why it caught on as a pasta flour. Whatever the reason, as a consequence finely ground semolina flour is exceedingly rare to find in stores. Fortunately, you can buy it from amazon.com an outlet like gustiamo.com.

Variations

While most well known Italian dishes come in variations, the number of variations on ciceri e tria is truly mindblogging. To begin with, the aromatics you cook the chickpeas with. Some recipes call for onion only, others for onion and celery, others like this one the whole “trinity” of onion, celery and carrot, plus herbs. In some cases, a bit of oil is added too. Tomato is optional, as indicated, but bear in mind if you do tomato, use just a bit. Most renditions of ciceri e tria are entirely in bianco.

In many recipes, probably the more traditional ones I surmise, you add the pasta—the portion you don’t fry, that is—directly to the pot where you’ve simmered the chickpeas and finish the dish from there. You do save dirtying two additional pots, but personally, I like this recipe. It lets you flavor the chickpeas in a soffritto while eliminating the excess starch by parboiling the pasta separately before mixing them with the chickpeas.

The ratio of chickpea to pasta varies enormously. And, as mentioned, recipes will also vary on how much of the pasta gets fried vs boiled. It can be as little as just a handful or as much as half. And you can decide how much of the fried pasta you mix with the rest of the dish and how much you reserve as topping. In some recipes, all the fried pasta gets mixed in, in others a portion and in yet others (like this one) all the fried pasta gets placed on top. And then, the tria itself can vary a bit in length and width and thickness. And finally in some recipes, the pasta you plan to fry gets made extra wide, then twisted into pretty spirals, a bit like chiacchiere, and placed on top of the pasta. Extra pretty!

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