Semolina flour, the unsung hero of Southern Italian cuisine

Last Sunday, during our Cook Along, I found myself smelling the dough when I felt it was ready, smooth, dense and silky under my hands, responsive to my rhytmic movements. I inhaled the smell of semolina flour, closed my eyes, and declared: this is the smell of fresh pasta to me, the smell of sun-ripened wheat, Sunday family gatherings, genuine food.

Semolina flour is one of the staple ingredients of the Italian South: yellowish, corser than soft wheat flour, it is usually used to make fresh pasta and bread.

There isn’t just one type of fresh pasta dough in Italy. Influenced by traditions, family uses, wealth or povery, and wheat availability, pasta is commonly made with farina 00 (which roughly translates to all-purpose flour) and eggs in the North and Centre of Italy, and with semolina flour in the South. There are obviously exceptions, as the pici dough from Val d’Orcia, in Tuscany, made with all purpose flour and water. Whenver you notice that fresh pasta is made without eggs picture a poorer land, where scarcity and inventiveness gave birth to some of the best fresh pastas of Italy.

On Sunday, with a bunch of passionate people, we shared a happy hour and made together cavatelli and orecchiette, two of the most loved Apulian fresh pastas. I shared my tips on how to use a your thumb, a knife or a bench scraper to make cavatelli, the slow motion movement to make orecchiette—how relaxing is it to make orecchiette while chatting and drinking a tea?—, and talked a lot about everything you can make with semolina flour.

This is how today’s post was born, an appreciation post for semolina flour, the unsung hero of the Southern Italian cuisine.

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Our monthly cook-along is a very informal, fun, chatty moment when we cook together a recipe from scratch. It is the closest thing to experiencing a cooking class in our Studio in the Tuscan countryside, but also a way to meet passionate people who love nothing more than spending some time cooking and chatting together. And at the end of the Cook Along you find yourself with a couple of recipes ready to be shared with your family or friends.

You can find the replays of the previous Cook Alongs here.

[MARK YOUR CALENDAR] The Next Cook Alongs will be:

• Sunday, JUNE 23rd at 9.00 pm CET - 3.00 pm EST - 12.00 pm PST

When we were so lucky to witness the ritual of bread making in Matera.

Semolina is also the flour of choice to make bread in the Italian South.