Lottie Lomme
Evan Funke is someone who didn't know what to do with his life, but he knew one thing. He wanted to learn how to make pasta. He signed up with Alessandra Spisni from La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese and so began his adventure that would lead to the book American Sfoglino.
The American Dream
With this book, he does what his teacher Spisni doesn't seem to really do. Turning a good story into a money machine. Funke is the story of The American Dream. He had a hard time, didn't know what to do with his life, was in a deep valley but climbed out by devoting himself to pasta in a meticulous way.
In our culture, we put on a pedestal those kinds of people who completely cut themselves off from everything and only do one thing extremely well. It's the craftsmen.
Funke, for example, also expresses his admiration for Kosaku Kawamura, a Japanese who, in the same almost obsessive way, is preoccupied with one detail of the world called pasta.
Alessandra Spisnic
His teacher Alessandra Spisni is also a pasta maker, but her book Le ricette dei grandi classicis is much less slick than her student's book. Perhaps her trough was less deep and her activity with the school seems less obsessive: for her it is just work.
It's funny how features of Italian culture outside Italy sometimes take on mythical proportions. An puff pastry make, for many nonnas it is normal but for people outside Italy it is a way of life. Alessandra is a woman who doesn't care about appearance or frills and can hardly be found on social media. Evan is a mediagenic tattooed and bearded hipster with all due respect for his teacher.
aprons
A lot of people like the story of the American Dream, but personally I like the cover (the cover) and the aprons of Spisni or Benedetta Rossi. Italian chefs who don't tell an American story of misery and how it ultimately improves you as a person if you perfect one activity. That seems rather doubtful to me. Although of course everyone is allowed to organize their life in a way that they see fit.
Funke's entire presentation is also rather falsely modest. He tells about his apprenticeship and proudly tells about the day when Spisni allowed him to cook for an Italian family. That he got a thumbs up from that whole Italian family and that that felt like the biggest recognition in his life until then. I have to say that I couldn't cook for 40 people and not the way Funke does it. Well, the best day of your life.
I do want to come back to those aprons. It's so Italian. Look, things like this. Your name and 'queen of the kitchen' will be embroidered on your apron while you wait in the shop.
The core of the story: the sfoglia
That said, Funke's book makes its subtitle A Masterclass in Handmade Pasta yes true. He understands what people want to know. Namely how to make good pasta. In doing so, he not only pays attention to the recipes, but he devotes about 40 pages of his fist-thick book to the technique of the puff pastry. The rolled out dough. Where the word sfoglino comes from: the dough maker.
Those 40 pages could have been more for me. Preferably 100. And then cut back on the recipes. Because similar recipes are already in many places.
Now I've been working on a good one myself for a while puff pastry and ended up on this video by Spisni where she shows that you can use the puff pastry must fold and must rest in plastic like an envelope. She calls that doppia asciugaturaFunke calls it I think curing.
From Funke I learn that you only do this if you are going to cut the pasta into tagliatelle, pappardelle, maltagliatia or other single-shaped pasta. In this way the paste dries more slowly and does not become brittle but remains soft and pliable.
Questions Evan, questions
For me that raises the question: should this also be done when you make stuffed pasta? Pasta where you have to press the spots extra because otherwise the cooking will not be the same everywhere, says Funke. Because if you dry pasta sheets, they are less likely to stick together when folding and making stuffed pasta.
I also have problems with a number of things when I make pasta. Often the paste becomes brittle when I dry it. Furthermore, I can't come up with good conservation techniques and I can't figure out why. In the fridge, my pasta becomes sticky and gooey (according to Danielle Glantz of Pastaio Via Corte, I should only flour the bottom and not put plastic over it).
So I prefer to store in the freezer, which is not recommended due to loss of taste. I searched the entire Italian internet and wrote a blog about the information about conservation that I did find. Also includes a link to the machine manufacturer for pasta factories.
myth-making
I also find no answers to such practical questions in this book by Evan Funke, which contributes somewhat to the myth-building surrounding good pasta. I don't like myths much, but Spisni doesn't answer all my questions either. She probably only does that if you come to her school to take a course.
Of course, she doesn't give that information away for free in tutorials on YouTube. In 10 years it will probably be different and a foodie from Zoetermeer will also be vlogging about it. However, I would really like to know everything now.
You know that advertisement for the State Lottery where you are urged to buy a ticket with which you can win 10.000 euros per month? And that you see a man who opens his bakery because of it? I want to be that man, but with my own pasta factory at home in Schoonhoven.
But as long as I still have so many unanswered questions about pasta making and I can't remotely learn about the master's techniques, I accept that my pasta is far from the perfection of Bolognese or Evan Funke's.
American Sfoglino – A Masterclass in Handmade Pasta
by: Evan Funke, Katie Parla
272 pages
€ 26,99 (also available as an e-book)
Chronicle Books, September 2019
ISBN 9781452173313
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