Here’s the latest from our homemade pasta saga – this trofie! Trofie comes from northern Italy, and its name tells you how it’s made: in the region’s dialect, strofia means “to rub”, and that’s partly how this pasta gets its shape. The technique to form this twisty pasta is pretty unique, and not easy – to be perfectly honest, it took Cyril a while to get the hang of it, and Miriam never quite got it down pat. But these were fun to see coming together, and they tasted great paired with a very green sauce (which we based on this recipe from the New York Times). So we’ll show you here how you too can make your own trofie, cook it up, and eat it with a tasty pesto.
You’ll need:
- Semolina flour
- 00 flour
- Pine nuts
- Parmesan
- Garlic
- Parsley
- Arugula
- Olive oil
- A 10-ounce package of frozen peas
To make the dough for the trofie, follow the first two steps here. Then when you’re ready to shape the pasta, uncover a small part of your dough from the plastic wrap and pick off pieces of dough that are about the size of a bean. Take one piece and use the inner edge of your palm to roll the piece upward, flattening it out as you go. Then roll the piece diagonally downward along the edge of your palm and then your thumb, so it curls as it moves. Roll until each dough piece is at the tip of your thumb, like so:
Here’s a video to help you:
In the end, your trofie should look like this:
Lay the pasta on pieces of parchment paper sprinkled with more semolina flour, and let them dry for an hour. After that, cover the sheets in plastic wrap and refrigerate if you aren’t cooking the trofie right away – but if you are, boil them in heavily salted water for 4 minutes, then use a spider strainer to fish them out of the water.
For the sauce, place 1/2 cup of pine nuts in a small skillet and and toast for 5 minutes over medium heat until they just start to brown. Take them off the stove to cool, then lay them out on a large cutting board along with three whole cloves of garlic and a pinch of salt. Roughly chop everything together.
Measure out a cup of arugula and a cup of parsley leaves. Gradually toss handfuls of these greens, plus more salt to taste, into the pile of pine nuts and garlic and chop as you go until all the arugula and parsley has been added in. Crush this mixture a few times with the broad side of your knife until you have an evenly chopped mixture.
Place all this into a large bowl and mix with 1/2 cup of olive oil and 2/3 cup of grated Parmesan, then stir in the trofie. Finally, heat up your pasta cooking water again and cook the peas at a boil for 3 minutes, then stir them into the pasta.
Now you can dish up your trofie!
Like many of the homemade pastas we’ve tried our hand at recently, these weren’t easy. Shaping the trofie requires some dexterity, and while Cyril got it eventually Miriam really struggled with the technique. But don’t get discouraged – trofie are nice and chewy and hold a sauce really well, and they were a real treat paired with this take on pesto. If you’ve got some skills and patience, you can definitely put them to good use making this fun, unique pasta shape.