Today we get to know one blog that I love a bit better: Trigoduro. Valentina Tanese, Italian living in Madrid, architect, cook and founder of Trigoduro answers to my questions.
Chiara: Why gluten free?
Valentina: I started making fresh pasta with gluten first. I come from Le Puglie region in Italy and it is a tradition in my family to make our own pasta. I grew up helping my grandmother making it. Now that I live in Madrid, I continue to do what I have always been doing. It comes all natural for me to make fresh pasta for lunch or for dinner.
Chiara: What is Trigoduro?
Valentina: At the beginning I had an idea of writing a book of family recipes, then I decided to start this project with a blog. In Spanish trigoduro means durum wheat and in Le Puglie we make pasta by using this kind of flour. At first my friends started to ask me for fresh pasta and I started to collect a lot of demands but then I had to choose whether I wanted to open up my own fresh pasta shop or not. Today I prefer to give classes and teach people how to make their own pasta. Making gluten free pasta is a challenge for me and I decided to take it. I have started to eat less gluten at home and most of all I don’t want to exclude people from my workshops. I want to create enough room for everybody’s tastes and needs. I mainly use whole rice flour, buckwheat, now I have bought some chestnut flour and I am planning to make tagliatelle with it.
Chiara: What is the gluten free food that you love the most?
Valentina: A rice cake I ate at the Feria Bio Cultura in Madrid.
Chiara: Gluten free is…
Valentina: I don’t want to define it. To me there are many different ways of cooking as there are many different ingredients, and gluten free is just one of them. The important thing to me is not to try to copy gluten. Gluten is something and gluten free is another. They react differently and the result you get from them is different, it cannot be the same. But they can be all the same good, tasty and delicious ! It is like cooking with chocolate or cocoa, they are both great but the result is going to be different.
Let’s discover which fresh pasta recipe Valentina has shared with Baci di Dama: gnocchi with bolognese souce
