In Apulia, or Puglia, as well as Lucano in neighboring Basilicata, it is not unusual to encounter classic strascinati, or “dragged” pasta. And, I could have started there, with a simple flour and water preparation, and one of the many classic sauces to acompany them. But, my eyes alighted on the less common strascinati di grano saraceno, or, buckwheat strascinati. It happened that I had buckwheat flour handy, and all of the ingredients for the sauce as well. So, a new entry into our list of peculiar pastas. It should be noted that they’re peculiar to me, and probably to a good portion of my readers, as opposed to being peculiar to the folk who live in the location they come from… though a couple of the ones I’ve covered are rarities even in their origin points.

Equal parts buckwheat flour and semolina seem to be the recommended approach. And it makes sense – I’ve tried making 100% buckwheat pasta and the texture is never quite right. I have the feeling a lot of that is that we can’t get what’s called light buckwheat flour here, just the dark, coarser version. The only other ingredient is just enough water to…

…have it come together into a smooth dough. Set it aside to rest for a little while – since it has little gluten in it, it doesn’t need as much relaxing time.

Roll out portions of it into long snakes of dough, about a centimeter in diameter.

And, cut one centimeter pillows off of these – almost like little gnocchi.

Then you drag, or, schmear, each one using the side of a knife, to create a slightly irregular oval. Basically, strascinati are orrechiete without the popped up dome in the middle, which basically you’d do by letting these curl up slightly around the knife rather than keeping them flat, and then popping the dome from the opposite side with your thumb… we’ll save that for future Puglia pasta posts, since it’s probably the most classic pasta shape of the region.

I didn’t use all of that dough in the end, it became clear it was going to be too much. And, since I was solo, I actually only used half of all this, saved the rest for another meal, but the process is the same. We have our strascinati, a zucchini, some garlic, basil leaves, tomato passata, and ricotta.

In a skillet, put the chopped garlic in olive oil and over medium heat sauté for a couple of minutes until the garlic is nice and aromatic.

Add the sliced zucchini and a good dose of cracked pepper. Just a pinch of salt, as usual, most of our salt will come from the pasta water.

Add some passata, and continue to cook. This is probably a good point to drop the strascinati into the boiling salted water. Because they’re freshly made, they only take a few mintues to cook.

Add a little of the starchy pasta water to the zucchini and tomato mixture, and stir it around vigorously to start to emulsify.

Add the strascinati and finish cooking for about two minutes in the sauce. If you need to, add a little more pasta water.

Add the shredded basil and toss to coat well. Adjust seasoning if need be. Since this doesn’t have a saltier cheese like pecorino or parmigiano being added to it, you might well need a good pinch of salt.

And serve, with some of the ricotta crumbled over the top.

I love the sauce, but I can’t say I’m enamored of the pasta itself. I think I’d like this dish a lot more made with strascinati that are made from just semolina, but maybe not – the buckwheat does give it a very rustic, whole grain kind of flavor. So, again, as referenced above, maybe if I had access to light buckwheat flour.