RECIPE: WildFarmed Wholemeal Tagliatelle with Leeks & Pecorino

Wholewheat Tagliatelle with Braised Leeks

recipe by Mitchell Damota, head chef at Burro e Salvia

Recipe for 2 portions

pasta dough:

150g 00 Flour

100g Wildfarmed fine ground wholemeal flour 

2 whole eggs

3 yolks 

sauce:
2 medium size leeks

1 clove garlic finely sliced 

1 fresh chilli (or a pinch of dry) 

Tablespoon olive oil

70g butter 

1 cup of stock (veg or chicken or water is also fine) 

Parmigiano Reggiano 24 months (grate at the end)

To make your past dough, crack the eggs into a bowl and add the flour, then mix with a fork until smooth. Once it is not too wet, take the dough out of the bowl and start kneading on a wooden top. The dough must be soft and elastic but not too wet, so keep adding flour if needed. Try and make it into a ball, then wrap it in cling film and put in the fridge for half an hour so that it can rest.

To roll your pasta, you have two options: by hand with a rolling pin or with the help of a machine. You need to make sheets of pasta of about 1mm thickness. To cut the pasta, insert the crank in the cutting accessory of the machine and feed the pasta sheet through the rollers to cut it.  Alternatively, you can hand cut your pasta with a sharp knife into tagliatelle.

In the meantime, clean leeks well, slice them about the width of the tagliatelle.

In a pan add a squeeze of olive oil, add the leeks and a pinch of salt. Start to sweat them down gently so you don’t get any colour on them, we just want to begin to soften them. Add the chilli and garlic and continue to soften everything. Add the butter and melt that down. Add the stock or water and bring the pan back up to a simmer. Put a lid on and turn the heat down as low as it can go. Cook for around 10 minutes until everything is really soft. If the pan goes dry before than just add another splash of stock/water. Check seasoning. Under season slightly as you should add a splash of the salty/starchy pasta water when finishing. 

Fresh tagliatelle cook in 1/2 minutes in salted boiling water.

Add the cooked tagliatelle to the pan with a splash of pasta water and bring everything back to the simmer. Move the pasta around a lot and that will help activate the starch. The starch and the butter should emulsify with the pasta water and remaining liquid from the leeks and create a creamy sauce to coat the pasta. Finish with a sprinkle of freshly grated parmesan cheese.