Vegetarian Giro d'Italia | Strozzapreti with a Mushroom Ragu

After the events of the Monday's stage, the Veggin' household really needed some warming comfort food. We needed a family meal to eat together while we mourned the passing of Wouter Weylandt. We ate this meal watching Weylandt take the stage in a glorous sprint just a year before during stage three of the 2010 Giro.  I had originally planned to do this recipe later in the week, but knew that this meal is what we needed to end what was a sad, sad day.

This dish is easy to make yet is just filled with flavor. Interestingly, although the ragu was creamy it light in texture so we didn't feel like we needed a nap on the couch after eating a bowl of it. I think the credit lies in not using heavy cream but instead used flour as a thickening agent. Just be a little patient adding in the liquid little by little and you'll be rewarded with a thicker ragu.

Porcini mushrooms are the base for this recipe. Porcini, meaning "piglet" in Italian, is revered for its earthy and nutty flavor. These little piglets live in the forest and form a mycorrhizal relationship with pine trees. Mycorrhizal? Yeah. That means that the porcini and the tree have a symbiotic relationship. The mushroom parks itself on the root of the tree and nibbles on the sugars the tree produces. Meanwhile, the large surface area of the mushroom provides better access to water and nutrients which then go into the root system of the tree. Now you're fully equipped to bring that word up at the next cocktail party and know what it means. (And, if you score a date off of using "mycorrhizal" in a sentence you now have a recipe you can make!)

In the US, porcini mushrooms are usually found in a dried form that requires reconstituting (like in the recipe below). Stay away from packages that look like someone stomped the crud out of the mushrooms thus turning them into moon dust. You'll just waste your money and end up with a cup full of nothing edible. If you find fresh porcini, those would be great to use - just find a mushroom broth so you don't miss out on adding that as an extra flavor.

But, don't let me finish up this post too soon. Let's talk vermouth - which also appears in this recipe. It was invented in Italy sometime in the 1700's.  Apparently, the wines that were being produced were a little off-putting in taste, so a winemaker put together a variety of spices into a white wine to help improve the taste...and vermouth was born. (Hrm, I think this calls for a future post where I explore the history of the martini....)

I borrowed liberally from a recipe in Madhu Jaffrey's World Vegetarian. In fact, so liberally that the only changes I made is the type of pasta I used and I used some of my homemade mushroom stock to enhance the flavor even more. The original recipe asks for fettuccine but I found the strozzapreti on my store shelf that intrigued me so I had to use it.

I hope that other cycling fans can also find as much comfort in this dish as we did.

Recipe and details on Veggin'