Troccoli con cime di rapa e cozze

Frank29 April 2023pasta, primi piatti, Puglia32 Comments

I’m just back from a two week trip to Italy, where we visited Rome, my old stomping grounds, and Puglia, the southern region where my paternal grandfather Lorenzo was born. It was a memorable trip, my first time back in Rome in years and, believe it or not, my first time ever in Puglia. We ate well just about everywhere we went. And of course, I came back home with lots of ideas for future posts.

In Rome I mostly revisited my favorite old classic dishes, most of which already figure in this website, although I have a few tricks up my sleeve for future posts. Today, however, I want to share with you one of the culinary highlights of my time in Puglia, where I discovered a kind of pasta native to Puglia called troccoli.

Troccoli are a kind of fresh thick long pasta made with durum wheat flour, for some reason far less known outside Italy than the world famous regional short pastas, orecchiette and cavatelli. Like their short format cousins, troccoli have a very appealingly chewy texture that pairs beautifully with a wide variety of sauces and dressings.

I tried them at a lovely restaurant called Antiche Mura in Polignano a Mare, dressed with a condimento of broccoli rabe and mussels. One bite and I knew I had to re-create this marvelous dish at home and share with you all. The combination of greens and seafood may come as a surprise for some, but it’s perfectly delicious. And no wonder: think of orecchiette con cime di rapa, the iconic Puglian dish which, in Italy, usually pairs broccoli rabe with anchovies.

Troccoli are admittedly a bit of a chore to make, but there are various ways to go about it (details in the Notes below) and, in any event, the broccoli rabe and mussel condimento works quite well with all sorts of pasta shapes.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

For the troccoli:

400g (14 oz) semola rimacinata (finely ground semolina flour-see Notes)
A pinch of salt
1 egg (optional)
200ml (7 fl oz) water, or as much as you need

For the mussels:

1 kilo (2 lb) mussels, or one net bag
1 clove of garlic, peeled and lightly crushed
olive oil
white wine

To finish the dish:

1 bunch broccoli rabe, just the tender shoots and leaves, cut into short lengths
1-2 cloves of garlic, peeled and lightly crushed
olive oil
250g (1/2 lb) cherry or grape tomatoes, cut in half crosswise (optional)
1 dried red pepper aka peperoncino (optional)

Directions

Making the troccoli

Place the semolina flour in a large bowl with a pinch of salt. Mix well, then add the egg (if using) and incorporate. Then add, bit by bit, as much water as you need to form a fairly stiff but workable dough.

Knead the dough until it’s smooth and elastic and not at all tacky. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let it rest for a half hour or more.

Roll the dough out about 3mm (1/8 in) thick using a pasta machine or rolling pin. (If you’re using a pasta machine, use roller setting 1.)

Cut the dough into strands about 3mm (1/8 in) wide. Traditionally, this is done with a special purpose ridged rolling pin called a troccolaturo, but if you don’t want to buy one, then there are other methods (see Notes for details).

Flour your troccoli well to prevent sticking and set them on a cutting board or pasta rack to dry.

Preparing the mussels

In a large pot, sauté the garlic very lightly in a bit of olive oil. Add the mussels, which you will have rinsed quickly to remove any external grit and trimmed of any byssal threads aka ‘beards’, along with a drizzle of white wine, and cover.

Let the mussels steam in the pot, shaking them from time to time, until all the mussels have opened. Remove the pot from the heat, and let the mussels cool, uncovered.

Remove the mussels from their shells and place in a bowl. (If you like you can leave a few in their shells for decorating the final dish.) Strain the mussel juice left in the bottom of the pot and pour over the mussels.

Cooking the pasta and finishing the dish

Bring well salted water to a boil in a large pot, then add troccoli and the broccoli rabe. Cook for about 5 minutes, until the troccoli are al dente.

Meanwhile, in a large sauté pan or skillet, sauté the garlic cloves (and the peperoncino, if using) in abundant olive oil. Add the tomatoes if using and let them sauté for a minute or two until just slightly softened. Discard the garlic and peperoncino.

Add the reserved mussels and their juices. Let the juices reduce a bit if they’re especially abundant. Turn off heat until the pasta is ready.

When the pasta is al dente, transfer it and broccoli rabe to the pan using a slotted spoon or wire skimmer, and give it all a good toss over a lively flame, adding a bit of pasta water if need be to keep things moist. Keep tossing until the pasta and its condimento are well mixed, and the pasta has absorbed most of the liquid.

Serve immediately.

Notes

How to make troccoli with a troccolaturo

Troccoli are made with finely ground semolina flour called semola rimacinata in Italian. As I’ve pointed out before, in the US at least you need to be careful as most semolina flour you’ll find in stores is coarsely ground and not suitable for making pasta. Chances are you’ll need to order it online.

Once you’ve kneaded the dough and let it rest, roll it out into a sheet about 3cm (1/8 inch) thick, and perhaps 30cm (12 inches) long and 10cm (4 inches) wide. (Thickness is key, while length and width more a matter of convenience and preference.)

Take your troccolaturo and, starting from one end of the pasta sheet, roll it back and forth along a short length of the dough, pressing down as hard as you can. Ideally the pin would cut through the pasta into strands but in practice it typically creates deep grooves like so:

Continue, bit by bit, until you reach the end of the pasta. Now take the pasta with one hand and smack it against your cutting board. This will separate, or at least begin to separate, the strands. Finally, separate the strands by hand or, if need be, using a knife.

Sounds involved, I know… When it comes to physical tasks like making pasta, words can make the process sound more complicated than it really is. Here’a video to illustrate the technique, as performed by a master:

I’m not going to lie, making troccoli with a troccolaturo isn’t terribly easy. At least for a beginner like myself. No matter how hard you press down, it never seems to cut the pasta entirely. You’re left to separate the strands by hand, which, if I’m honest, gets rather tedious.

There’s a type of troccolaturo made out of bronze, which is much more effective than the wooden type, but they’re hard to find these days. In fact, apparently they were originally made out of metal back in the day. Bartolomeo Scappi, in his 1570 Opera, perhaps the most famous Italian cookbook of the Renaissance, includes an illustration of the troccolaturo, though he calls it a ferro da maccheroni, or macaroni iron. For reasons I can’t fathom, over time they’ve given way to today’s cheaper but less effective wooden models.

Fortunately for lazy cooks like me, there are alternative ways to make troccoli. Perhaps most common is to use a “chitarra”, the same instrument you use to make spaghetti alla chitarra aka tonnarelli. Use the side with the wider spaced strings. See this post for detailed instructions. Indeed, after trying my hand at one batch of troccoli, I switched to the chitarra for comparison. Here are the two, side by side:

On the left are the troccoli made with a troccolaturo. On the right, with a chitarra. The difference is quite subtle, mostly noticeable because the chitarra makes the strands come out uniformly even, not necessarily a bad thing. And once cooked, I’d defy anyone to tell the difference.

Otherwise, you could use your pasta maker or an extrusion machine. The problem is that the most common attachments, for spaghetti or fettuccine, are either too narrow or too wide, which will change the mouth feel of the pasta considerably. But I guess they’ll do in a pinch. If you can find an attachment for trennette, that’d be closer to the mark.

Alternative methods and pastas

If you’d rather not make your own pasta, you can always opt for store bought. In Italy, troccoli are sold commercially like other pasta shapes. Elsewhere in the EU you can buy them online. In the US you can buy them on amazon.com (but only if you really like troccoli, since they only come in a 12-pack costing $80!) Otherwise, store bought spaghetti alla chitarra would be a fairly close substitute.

And in fact, this broccoli rabe and mussels condimento lends itself nicely to many pasta shapes, both long and short. I’ve seen recipes for pasta con cime di rapa e cozze calling for orecchiette or cavatelli, for example, and wide variety of factory pastas including spaghettoni, spaghetti, linguine, casarecce, paccheri or calamarata.

Prepping the broccoli rabe

I call for trimming the broccoli rabe here. In Puglia cima di rape is rather different from the kind you can find here in the US. It’s a lighter green and has rather slender stems, with a milder flavor. I suspect it’s harvested younger. (Here’s a picture.)

The broccoli rabe here in the US has a more assertive taste and thicker stems. Both have their charms, and the US variety is fine in my view for pairing with orecchiette. But in a dish like this using long strands of pasta, I’d recommend trimming your broccoli rabe so you’re only using the more slender stems, leaves and florets.

Variations

Troccoli are sometimes made with an egg, sometimes not. They are usually made with all semolina rimacinata, finely ground semolina flour. You will find the occasional recipe where you make the dough with a mix of semolina and all purpose flour, providing a slightly softer texture.

In this recipe, I’ve called for cooking the pasta and broccoli rabe together. It saves time. But you can cook the broccoli rabe separately, then transfer it to the pan where you’ve sautéed the garlic in oil, and let it simmer a bit, before add the reserved mussel and their juices. You then cook the troccoli in the same water as the broccoli rabe and when done, added to the pan to toss with is condimento as in the main recipe.

In the version I had at Antiche Mura, the broccoli rabe was very much intact, appearing as little green flecks in the pasta, much as pictured in this post. I rather liked that approach, as otherwise the assertive taste of the broccoli rabe could have overwhelmed the mussels. But in some recipes you allow the broccoli rabe to melt into a kind of purée to coat the pasta, much as you usually do with orecchiette. Indeed, some fancy recipes take this a step further and have you purée the sautéed broccoli rabe. That makes for a more elegant take on this otherwise rustic dish.

There are other variations, too, among the ingredients. This recipe calls optionally for some tomato, which is the way I enjoyed it in Polignano. But I’ve noticed most recipes omit it, so it’s your choice. You can also make this dish with clams rather than mussels. The dish can be spicy or not, depending on your preference. The version I had in Polignano wasn’t spicy in the least. And in a few recipes, you scrape a little lemon zest on top the finished dish. But please, no grated cheese!

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