Pici

Pici are thick strands of pasta, roughly two to four millimetres across and twenty to thirty centimetres long, made by hand-rolling small pieces of a flour-and-water dough. There is no egg, no machine and no bronze die: the shape comes entirely from the movement of a palm across a wooden board.

The Italian verb for that movement, appiciare, gives the pasta its name. Because the rolling is done by hand, every strand tapers, thickens and twists slightly differently, and the surface stays matt and rough. That irregularity is not a charming defect. It is the technical reason a simple garlic-and-tomato sauce holds onto pici when it would slide straight off a machine-extruded spaghetto.

In Montalcino and parts of the Val d'Orcia the same pasta is called pinci. The name changes, the dough and the gesture do not.

Pici belong to a very specific stretch of Tuscany: the Val d'Orcia, the Sienese side of the Val di Chiana, and the hill towns south of Siena. North of the Chianti hills they are not local, and anywhere they appear on a menu in Florence they have travelled.

Of wheat, mostly, which sounds like a non-answer until you eat pasta this thick. There is no egg richness and no semolina snap; instead there is a soft, doughy chew close to a very fresh udon, with a faintly sweet flour flavour that survives whatever sauce is on it.

The texture is the point. A well-made pico is dense and slightly resistant at the centre, softer at the tapered ends, and the mouthfeel changes across a single strand. Overcooked they go gummy; undercooked the core stays chalky, and the window between the two is narrower than for dried pasta.

With aglione, the mild giant garlic of the Val di Chiana, the dish tastes sweet and tomato-forward rather than pungent. With toasted breadcrumbs it becomes nutty and dry, a bowl of almost nothing that works better than it should.

Cook them in a lot of well-salted water and start tasting at four minutes, because fresh pici go from chalky to gummy quickly, and the right moment is when the very centre still offers slight resistance. Pull them out with tongs rather than draining, and keep a mugful of the water.

Finish them in the pan. Pici shed a great deal of starch, so a ladle of cooking water and thirty seconds of tossing will build a glossy sauce out of almost nothing. This step does more for the dish than any ingredient you could add.

Four sauces carry the tradition. Aglione: slow-cooked tomato with the mild giant garlic of the Val di Chiana, sweet rather than pungent. Alle briciole: breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil with garlic and chilli, and nothing else. Cacio e pepe made with Tuscan pecorino from Pienza, softer and less salty than the Roman version. And ragù, made here from duck or from wild boar and cooked for hours.

Avoid thin, watery sauces and anything cream-based. A strand this thick needs a sauce that coats it, not one it sits in.

Fresh pici go into the fridge as they came, in loose floured nests on a tray, covered loosely rather than sealed, and they hold two or three days on the shop date. They keep drying while they sit, so the outside stiffens while the core stays soft and they want an extra minute in the water. Press the nests down or bag them tightly and the strands fuse into a solid block that cooks in clumps, so keep the coils open and keep the flour on them.

Drying them out completely is the traditional alternative: spread on a floured cloth or a rack at room temperature they go brittle in a day or two depending on the humidity and then keep for weeks in a tin, though they snap easily when handled. For the freezer, firm the nests up on a tray before bagging, use them within a month or two and drop them in frozen; thawed on the counter they weep and stick. Dried boxed pici want a cool dry cupboard and an airtight jar once opened.

Irregularity is the mark of the real thing. Each strand is rolled out under the palms, so it swells and narrows along its length between roughly two and four millimetres, no two are alike, and the ends often taper. A strand of even thickness from tip to tip came out of a die. The colour is a dull cream rather than yellow, because the dough is soft wheat flour and water with no egg, and the surface is rough and floury, which is exactly why the sauce grips. Fresh pici are sold coiled in loose nests, heavily dusted so they do not weld together.

What gets mistaken for them: bucatini, which are hollow, uniform and extruded; thick spaghettoni, uniform again; and udon, which is salted and altogether softer. Umbrichelli and lombrichelli from Umbria and northern Lazio are the same idea under another name, as is Tuscan pinci. Machine made strands sold as pici give themselves away by their regularity. In Siena fresh pici run 8 to 14 euro a kilo; abroad reckon on £5 to £8 for a 250g fresh pack or $6 to $10 for 500g dried.

Fresh pici rarely travel, so outside Tuscany the realistic choice is the dried version. In the US, Italian importers and online specialists carry bronze-die dried pici at roughly 8 to 14 dollars for a 500-gram bag; in the UK, Italian delicatessens and Ocado stock them at about 6 to 10 pounds a bag. Look for durum wheat semolina and water as the only ingredients, bronze extrusion and slow drying stated on the pack.

In Tuscany itself, buy them fresh from a pastificio or an alimentari at 8 to 14 euros a kilo, and the shops in Pienza and Montepulciano sit at the top of that range. They keep two days in the fridge and freeze well raw.

For the sauce, aglione is hard to find abroad and worth ordering online from Val di Chiana growers if you want the real thing; a whole head of ordinary garlic, cooked very slowly until it collapses, is the workaround.

The cheapest route remains flour and water. Pici are one of the few celebrated pastas that need no equipment at all.

The Val d'Orcia and the Sienese Val di Chiana: Pienza, Montepulciano, Montalcino, San Quirico d'Orcia, Sarteano, Cetona. In many trattorie there the pasta is rolled every morning, and in some of them the board is in sight of the dining room.

Celle sul Rigo, a hamlet in the comune of San Casciano dei Bagni, holds a summer sagra dedicated to pici; through July, August and September similar village festivals run across the Val d'Orcia and Val di Chiana, and they are the best place to watch the rolling done by people who have done it their whole lives.

Siena has pici on nearly every menu with wildly varying quality. Walk ten minutes away from Piazza del Campo and both the cooking and the price improve.

Montalcino and Montepulciano combine the pasta with the other reason to be there: plenty of Brunello and Nobile estates serve a plate of pici all'aglione as part of a cellar visit, which is the most efficient way to understand why these two things belong together.