One of the things I get asked about, probably more than anything, is how I come up with new dishes, given that we change our menu every week, and it does seem like I go out to eat a fair amount. And my answer is always something to the effect of, “from everywhere and everything that I do, day to day, I never know what might inspire me”. Finding time to try things out is rarely an issue – working at home, I’m not limited to traditional meal times to try something out, sometimes I just take a break for a couple of hours from other stuff and go in the kitchen and cook. If it doesn’t work out, it feeds the garbage can, if it does, it might feed us, it might just be tasted by us, and feed one or another of our neighbors.

I mentioned in my Montevideo posts that I’d come across these craft beers from Boar in Uruguay. I was just intrigued by the unusual flavors, and curious to see if they would even work. The first one I’d come across was the Carrot Saison style beer. Now, I hadn’t actually tried any of these, they were just for sale, and I thought I’d come back home and figure out something to do with each. The carrot beer is good, certainly enough that I started thinking about what I could pair it with. The carrot flavor itself is subtle, and if you didn’t know it was a carrot infused beer, you’d likely not pick up that that was the flavor – it just provides an interesting sweetness in the background. Now, I’m not a beer expert, but my understanding of the saison beer “style” is that it can be pretty varied, and is basically a pale ale, usually somewhat fruity and spicy. And, I’d say this fits that bill. It was a little “hoppier” than I expected, but not overwhelmingly so, certainly not as much as many IPAs are these days. And, it got me thinking about carrots….

Now, what I’m going to show here isn’t the whole thought process. I actually started out thinking about making something like lamb and carrot potstickers, maybe shaped like carrots in a vividly orange tinged dough, atop a little soil of crushed fennel shortbread, drizzled with a chili caramel, and decorated with fennel fronds. That thought probably came from Buddakan’s famous carrot dumplings… which I just happened across a couple of week’s ago. And I still might play with some ideas inspired by those. But I wanted to go more “all carrot”, and also was thinking about something vegetarian – someone had asked me recently if it’s possible to make a really good ragu with a sort of demiglace base, but without any meat, and I’d been looking into it.

I thought about different types of dumplings, empanadas, crepes, cannelloni, and more, and somewhere or other got to a traditional Sardinian pasta called culurgioni. Mostly because they’re kind of the right shape I was envisioning. Now, they’re not a pasta shape that I’ve ever been taught to make, and they’re not at all easy to form, or at least it doesn’t seem so. I watched a half dozen videos of how to do it on YouTube and I’m no closer to figuring out how to actually do it. I need to talk to Daniele Pina, the chef at La Locanda here, and see if he can show me how.

So first, I wanted a carrot infused dough – and really all I did was juice a carrot and use that as the liquid for making a small ball of semolina pasta. I added an egg yolk as well to intensify the color, but this could easily be vegan if you leave that out, the color will be less vivid, but it won’t make the dough and less successful. And, the traditional filling for culurgioni is a mashed potato, so I boiled up a little potato and carrot together, mashed them, and seasoned with salt, and a hint of Chinese five-spice – those potstickers were still lingering in the back of my mind.

Rolled out the dough, cut out rounds, and put a heaping tablespoon of filling on each.

As you can see, if you went and looked at what culurgioni should look like, these ain’t them. They’re not even well formed potstickers. This is going to take some practice and work, and as I said, a demonstration of how to do it.

Meanwhile, I’d roasted a big carrot, cut in batons, in some olive oil, until they were completely soft, and lightly charred. I pureed those in the food processor. In essence, my idea was that the caramelized carrot from roasting would be the fill-in for the richness of the demiglace.

And then started on this idea for the ragu. In a little olive oil, sauteed a brunoise (very small dice) of carrot, celery, shallot, and garlic, until lightly colored. Then I added a spoonful of tomato paste and a splash of red wine, some cumin seeds and szechuan peppercorns, and cooked that down until there was no liquid left. At that point, I added a good splash of soy sauce, and the pureed roasted carrot. It was a little thick, so I put in some water too, to have enough liquid to cook down.

I then let it cook, over low heat, for about 30 minutes, until I had a rich, ragu consistency. And, I really liked the flavor. With the soy, it didn’t need any more than a large pinch of salt to bring it into balance.

And then, boiled up the pasta, and served it up, to me. I was figuring that I’d eat a little plate of four, and give the remaining four to our porter, next door, and then have something else for the rest of my dinner. But, these were really good. So I ate all eight. And they went really well with the beer. Now, they’re not ready for an appearance on a Casa SaltShaker menu – I want to get the form right, and I’m thinking about what would make the sauce a little richer – maybe using vegetarian oyster sauce (mushroom sauce) instead of part or all of the soy sauce. And maybe just a hint of chili along with the szechuan peppercorn and cumin, but just a hint.

To be played with more, and sometime soon, I’ll post the next iteration….