Tajarin, sunshine in pasta

On Sunday mornings, in many Langhe kitchens, the table was covered in flour long before the rest of the house woke up. In the middle, a well; inside it, the yolks, one after another; and then the hands: kneading, rolling, folding. That is how tajarin were born, the Piedmontese name for tagliolini, the pasta of feast days.

A recipe of subtraction

The secret lies almost entirely in the egg. Family recipes speak of incredibly rich doughs, with thirty or forty yolks per kilo of flour and little or no water. It is the yolk that gives that deep yellow colour and a texture that holds up in cooking and clings to the sauce.

You can tell a good tajarin by eye: thin, irregular, cut by hand. It should look made by someone, not by a machine.

The sheet is rolled out very thin, left to dry just a little, rolled up and cut with a knife into strands a couple of millimetres wide. Then the tajarin are spread out on the board in little nests, ready for a cooking time that is very short: a minute, sometimes less.

Traditional sauces

Every season has its tajarin. In autumn the most famous is with melted butter and white truffle shaved at the table. Then there is the sausage or chicken-liver ragù of village trattorias; butter and sage for a quick supper; porcini mushrooms after the September rains. The principle stays the same: few ingredients, very good ones, so as not to smother the pasta.

From the pasta board to your kitchen

In the farmhouses and trattorias of the Langhe there are still people who roll out tajarin by hand every day. Some of our experiences take you right there, hands in the flour beside someone who teaches you, before you sit down at the table and taste the result.

For those who prefer to cook them at home, we are selecting artisan pasta makers who still work the old way: when the LangheMyFood shop opens you'll find them there, together with the sauces that go with them.