Strozzapretti

In an ongoing attempt to try new things, today we made an egg-free Strozzapretti, meaning “priest strangler” in Italian (you cant make this stuff up). While strozzapretti is not the most widely known shaped pasta, its hand twisted shape makes a great vegan variety that can be dried, packaged and stored without breaking. Its starts much like a farfalle– folding your long sheet of pasta dough into a small rectangular package, slicing it into thin strips and unrolling each long strip. Next comes the fun part: simply take the long strip of pasta between your palms and roll, breaking the small sections of rolled pasta off at about 2 inch long increments. The result is a rustic-looking, twisted, short pasta variety that conveniently soaks up and stores any yummy sauce added to it in its spiral coils. Today’s strozzapretti was made with a whole wheat and fresh rosemary dough cooked and flavored simply with a small pat of butter, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a sprinkle of parmiggiano reggiano. We’ll experiment with these “priest stranglers” over the next week, trying out both a fresh egg pasta variety and finessing our dried, egg-free recipe.