He can transform even a simple dish into a differently traditional one, but he can also reach the exotic with canned tuna
Pasta and family. Pasta is familiar. Time, formats and recipes live in the first courses of Italian cuisine and the interpretation given by Alfio Ghezzi isone the most appreciated. “Pasta has long represented a special dish for me”. Ghezzi grew up in the mountains, where pasta was eaten only on special occasions and served with butter and cheese. The chef tells us about his pasta, between his Insolito Trentino and the future.
What role did pasta have in your cuisine?
“The role we Italians have given it. It is the plate of our identity. In recent times, I have moved towards new experiments. Thus, puffed pasta was born for the aperitif or a fermented pasta obtained from a Lebanese tradition that uses the Boulgor giving life to Triticum, a dish where the only ingredient is pasta”.
How is Insolito Trentino born?
“From a sentence of Bottura imprinted in my memory: “Are we sure that the tradition is respectful of the territory?” A differently traditional recipe was born. It describes the territory starting from four products not used in Trentino but which are excellences: Trento Doc, Trentingrana, Extra Virgin Garda Trentino Dop and Pasta of Pastificio Felicetti. An emulsion between oil and wine, flavouring unsaturated fat with very little garlic, adding vegetable broth, which is reduced and added Trentodoc. It is filtered with the cooking of the pasta that will be finished in this liquid while stirring with the Trentingrana. A white pasta characterized by the acidity smoothed by the reduction and by the Trentingrana”.
What future will pasta have in our diet?
“The perfect food for the future. Growing wheat requires little water, and pasta has a conservation that does not use cold and energy. Its natural versatility facilitates its use, both as a main course and as a side to protein ingredients, but also in desserts “.
Then, the Monograno Kamut Chiocciole Pasta, Trentingrana sauce, tuna and coffee.
“As a child I was used to a genuine mountain cuisine, barley soup, spleen dumplings and Canederli. Thus, a simple pasta, bow-tie pasta perhaps, topped with cheese, foaming butter and sage was a delicious food. My mother used to cook it on holidays. It didn’t take much to amaze us, and the canned tuna had something exotic. So on a Sunday, when my mother added some touches of tuna to the bow-tie pasta with parmesan, butter and sage, it was a surprise, a lively emotion: I picked up the recipe and proposed it again with the necessary haute cuisine adjustments”.
