Wheat first arrived in Sicily around the 3rd millennium B.C. Due to its ideal cultivation conditions, the region became known as the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire.
By 2021, the island had become Italy's second-largest durum wheat-producing region, with 343,500 hectares under cultivation and a production of 931,800 tons.
You may have seen durum on the back of a box of pasta. It's frequently coarsely ground into semolina, a common ingredient in Sicilian bread and pasta.
One of the more popular semolina pastas is cavatelli, also known as cavateddi. This Sicilian version of gnocchi is served with plain red or meaty sauce. I recently caught up with private chef and cooking instructor Antonella La Macchia to learn more about this specialty and what differentiates her cavatelli recipe from typical gnocchi.
What is your background?
I was born in Catania, Sicily, and live in Florence, Tuscany. I moved here 23 years ago because I married a Florentine, and I have been teaching cooking classes in Florence for more than 10 years now.
What is the difference between cavatelli and gnocchi?
It's funny. When people take the class, they usually talk about potatoes and gnocchi because they are the more traditional or famous.
If I talk with my mother, gnocchi are completely different. Our gnocchi in Sicily, cavatelli, are made with semolina and water. The dough is very chewy and has a nice consistency. Of course, the flavor is completely different because we have the semolina flour. Also, the sauce that they require is different. Most of the time, Sicilian gnocchi are served with meat sauce because they have this consistency and want a strong sauce.
The shape is different because when we make gnocchi, we use a tool called rigagnocchi. You use the board to make a little cavity that holds the sauce. That's the reason why they're called cavatelli.
Semolina pasta can also be a little bit trickier than regular pasta. The regular pasta, the pasta from the north—ravioli and tagliatelli—has the classic dough with flour and egg. When we talk about pasta from the south of Italy, from Puglia to Sicily, it's important to balance the right amount of water to obtain the right consistency. This shape is usually made by pushing the pasta on a wooden board with your hand or knife. If the consistency is not perfect, it won't be easy to have the shape of the pasta you want.
Once you have a good dough, you can make the cavatelli with your hands or use the rigagnocchi. It is important to get the right shape because, of course, if this pasta is thicker, it can be pretty chewy.
What makes this recipe Sicilian?
When I teach about pasta, I always say that through the pasta, we can see the difference between the countries. You can see easily that this country was divided for many years, and the food from the north and the south is very different.
When we talk about fresh pasta, the first difference that we can say is that most of the fresh pasta that we find in the north is made with white flour. What makes this pasta really Sicilian for me is the use of semolina and, of course, the sauce. We don't have butter and sage; ours is mostly red, so tomato-based.
What do you hope the readers will take away from this recipe?
What I like, and I always talk about this during my class, is that at the end of the day, the most important thing is when a recipe becomes yours. It makes the food real and, in a certain way, eternal.
>>Get Antonella's Sicilian gnocchi recipe here!<<
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