Pizzoccheri

Pizzoccheri are flat buckwheat noodles about 7 cm long, a centimetre wide and a couple of millimetres thick: greyish-brown, rough-surfaced and deliberately rustic. They have carried Protected Geographical Indication status as Pizzoccheri della Valtellina IGP since 2016.

The rules require at least 80% buckwheat flour, with wheat flour making up the rest. Buckwheat has no gluten and will not hold a dough together on its own, so that wheat fraction is structural rather than a shortcut.

The word also names an entirely different dish. Pizzoccheri bianchi di Chiavenna, from a neighbouring valley, are small white gnocchi made with bread and wheat flour. Same word, unrelated plate.

Almost nobody eats pizzoccheri plain. In practice the noodle and the dish that goes with it, pizzoccheri alla valtellinese, are the same subject.

Nutty, earthy and faintly bitter, the way soba noodles or a good rye bread are. Buckwheat has a mineral, toasted flavour that is much more assertive than wheat pasta, and the texture is softer and more crumbly: pizzoccheri never go truly al dente.

The finished dish is rich in a very alpine way: melted semi-hard cheese, browned butter with garlic, sweet boiled potato and the sulphurous edge of savoy cabbage. The bitterness of the buckwheat is what keeps it from being cloying, and it is the reason the dish works at all.

If you want a reference point, it sits somewhere between a mountain gratin and a bowl of very good macaroni cheese, with the sweetness swapped out for earthiness.

Everything cooks in one pot, in sequence. Diced potato goes into salted boiling water first, savoy cabbage cut into ribbons follows after a few minutes, and the pizzoccheri go in last: 12 to 15 minutes for dried, 7 to 10 for fresh, so that everything finishes together.

Lift it all out with a slotted spoon and build it in a warm bowl in layers (noodles and vegetables, thin slices of Valtellina Casera, a dusting of grana) repeating until it is used up. Meanwhile brown butter in a small pan with a smashed garlic clove and, if you like, a few sage leaves, and pour it smoking hot over the top.

Toss it at the table and eat it immediately. This dish does not wait: within ten minutes the butter separates and the cheese tightens.

Three things ruin it. Cream or béchamel, which are not in the recipe and turn it into something else. Grated instead of sliced cheese, which will not stretch. And the oven, which dries it out. Leftovers are best fried hard in a nonstick pan the next day for the crisp edges.

Dried pizzoccheri live in the cupboard like any pasta, a year or more, with a best-before date printed by the maker. One difference matters: buckwheat carries more fat than wheat and that fat oxidises faster, so an open pack in a warm cupboard picks up a flat, papery note within weeks. Reseal it tightly or decant into a jar, kept away from coffee and spices, whose smells buckwheat takes on readily.

Fresh pizzoccheri hold three or four days in the fridge on a floured tray under a cloth, and they freeze well: cook straight from frozen with a couple of extra minutes.

The dressed dish is another matter. It holds a day in the fridge, but reheating separates the butter out and tightens the cheese into rubbery strings. A hot non-stick pan, pressing it down into a crisp cake, treats it better than a microwave. A whole piece of Casera keeps in the fridge wrapped in greaseproof paper, never with film pressed flat against the cut face.

An honest pack states the buckwheat percentage on the label, and anything above eighty percent tells you it is the real thing. The colour should be a matte grey-brown rather than pale beige: a pale ribbon is mostly wheat. The surface should look rough and dull, which comes from a bronze die or a hand cut, and the shape is a short flat ribbon, around seven centimetres long and half a centimetre wide, not a long noodle. In the pot, good ones stay whole and firm; low-buckwheat versions go slack and rubbery.

On a shelf abroad the confusion is with Japanese soba, also buckwheat but round in section, thinner, and built for broth or for eating cold. Generic buckwheat penne and fusilli are a different thing again.

The cheese is half the recognition problem. The Teglio recipe asks for Valtellina Casera DOP, semi-fat, aged two to six months, which melts into strands. Bitto DOP, older and more expensive, is grated in for aroma. Grana or Parmigiano can sit alongside them, never replace them.

Dried pizzoccheri travel well and are the practical choice abroad. In the US, Italian importers and online grocers stock them; in the UK, Italian delis and specialist online shops such as Sous Chef carry both the pasta and Valtellina Casera. A 500 g pack runs about $6–10 or £4–8.

Read the buckwheat percentage on the pack. Anything above 80% is the real thing; a lot of supermarket 'buckwheat pasta' sits at 30–50% and tastes mostly of wheat. The colour tells you too: proper pizzoccheri are matte grey-brown, not pale beige.

For the cheese, look for Valtellina Casera DOP first and Fontina Val d'Aosta second. Buy a block, not a bag of shreds: the anti-caking agents on pre-grated cheese stop it melting cleanly.

Teglio, in the province of Sondrio, claims the dish and defends it: the Accademia del Pizzocchero di Teglio has codified the recipe since 2002, and the town holds its Sagra del Pizzocchero in July, with cooking in the square and long communal tables. Palazzo Besta, a Renaissance palace improbably far north, is worth the same trip.

The rest of the middle Valtellina delivers: Sondrio, Chiuro, Ponte in Valtellina, and Tirano, where the Bernina Express narrow-gauge railway begins its climb into Switzerland. The terraced vineyards above the road produce the Nebbiolo that goes with the dish.

In winter the ski towns of Bormio and Livigno serve it everywhere, generally in a richer, less orthodox version.