Orecchiette

Orecchiette means 'little ears'. They are made from durum wheat semolina, water and salt (nothing else, no egg) and shaped by hand in two movements: a cube of dough is dragged across a wooden board with a blunt knife until it curls open, then turned inside out over the tip of the thumb.

The geometry is the point. The dome is thin enough to go translucent, the rolled rim is two or three times thicker. Cooked, that gives you two textures in one bite: a yielding cup that soaks up sauce and a chewy ring that holds its bite. It is why orecchiette work with the thin, oily, brothy dressings of southern Italian cooking, where a smooth pasta would simply shed them.

The name changes every few kilometres. Recchietelle or recchie around Bari and in Salento; strascinati when the disc is left open rather than flipped; chiancarelle when they are made very small, after the flat paving stones of Puglian streets; pociacche up on the Murgia plateau. They are all the same gesture, scaled to the hand that makes them.

The pasta itself tastes of wheat, and more so than most: durum semolina with no egg has a clean, faintly sweet, almost bready flavour that comes through because nothing is masking it. Good ones smell like a bakery when the water hits them.

Texture does most of the work. The thin centre goes soft and slightly slippery, the thick rim stays firm and springy, and the contrast between the two is the whole reason the shape exists. Handmade orecchiette are noticeably chewier than factory ones, closer to a fresh Asian wheat noodle than to dried spaghetti.

In the classic dish, the pasta is the mild element against strong company: bitter broccoli rabe, salt-cured anchovy that dissolves into the oil, garlic, chilli and fried breadcrumbs. Nothing is creamy and nothing is sweet: it is a savoury, bitter, olive-oil-driven plate.

Salt the water hard and use plenty of it. If you are making the classic dish, boil the broccoli rabe first, then drop the orecchiette straight into the same water, because the greens leave behind a bitterness the pasta absorbs, and washing it away is a beginner's mistake.

Meanwhile, warm good olive oil with a crushed garlic clove, two or three salted anchovies and a dried chilli until the anchovies melt. Drain pasta and greens together, keep a ladle of the water, and toss everything hard in the pan for a minute. Finish with fried breadcrumbs, the mollica, which stand in for cheese. No parmesan goes on this dish in Puglia.

Timing: fresh 6-8 minutes, artisan dried 12-15. Test the thick rim, not the centre, because the centre is always ready first.

Beyond the classic: a slow-cooked meat ragù with rolled beef braciole, grated cacioricotta with burst cherry tomatoes, or ricotta forte loosened with pasta water. The rule is that the sauce must be liquid or creamy enough to get inside the cup.

Dried semolina orecchiette are the easy case. An unopened packet keeps in a dark cupboard for a year or two, and the date printed on it is the maker's reference. Once open, decant them into a jar with a tight lid. Nothing visible happens to them, but the wheat aroma flattens over the months and the surface picks up whatever the cupboard smells of.

Fresh orecchiette run on a different clock. Spread on a tray dusted with semolina and covered with a tea towel, they hold about two days in the fridge; sealed in a plastic box they sweat and glue themselves into a block. To keep them longer, dry them: one layer on a cotton cloth in a dry, airy spot for twenty four to forty eight hours, turned once. When they snap cleanly instead of bending they go into a jar for around six months, and they will want a few extra minutes in the water. They also freeze raw, spread apart on a tray then bagged, and go into the pot frozen with two minutes more.

Handmade orecchiette are never uniform. Sizes wobble, thicknesses vary, and the print of the thumb that dragged the dough is often still visible on the dome. The colour is a matte straw yellow, never chalk white and never shiny. Run a fingertip across the surface: it should scrape like fine sandpaper. If it slides, the pasta was pushed through a Teflon die and sauce will slip off it in the bowl. On a dried packet, look for bronze drawn or trafilata al bronzo, and for a rim clearly thicker than the centre.

Two shapes sold as orecchiette abroad are something else. Uniform little discs of even thickness cook flat and lose the double bite of thin dome against chewy rim. Half open, flattened shells are strascinati, a good Puglian shape and a different one. Cavatelli, everywhere in Italian American shops, are rolled tubes rather than ears. Price is a fair guide: a 500 g packet of industrial extruded orecchiette costs about what any supermarket pasta costs, while a bronze drawn one from a Puglian producer runs two to four times that.

In the US, dried Puglian orecchiette from producers such as Rummo, Granoro, Riscossa and De Cecco are in most large supermarkets at 4 to 9 dollars a pound; Eataly, Gustiamo and Italian delis carry small-producer bronze-die versions. Frozen handmade orecchiette and cavatelli turn up in Italian-American markets in New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey and are better than the dried mid-market brands.

In the UK, Ocado, Waitrose and Italian delicatessens stock dried orecchiette at roughly 3 to 6 pounds per 500 g. Look for 'trafilata al bronzo' or 'bronze die' on the packet: it is the single most useful thing printed there.

What to check: the rim should be visibly thicker than the centre, the surface should be matte and chalky rather than glossy, and the pasta should be pale straw, not bright yellow. Bright yellow with no egg listed means the semolina was dried fast and hot.

Making them at home costs about a euro of semolina per kilo and takes forty minutes once you have the knack, which takes roughly twenty ruined ones to acquire.

Via dell'Arco Basso in Bari Vecchia is the address. It is a short alley where women make orecchiette on wooden tables in the street from before dawn until mid-morning, selling them fresh by weight. It is a working trade rather than a display, and watching the two movements up close teaches more than any video.

Up on the Murgia, Altamura and Gravina in Puglia serve orecchiette with broccoli rabe only in season, roughly November to March, and the good places say so rather than reaching for frozen broccoli. Pair the meal with Altamura's bread, which has DOP status of its own.

In the Valle d'Itria (Locorotondo, Cisternino, Martina Franca) the sauce is more often a slow beef ragù, and the local white wines are made for it. Further south towards Lecce they are called recchie and turn up with fresh tomato and grated cacioricotta.