Tajarin

Tajarin is the Piedmontese dialect word for tagliolini, but the dialect version is a different animal. The defining feature is the yolk count. The Langhe standard is thirty yolks to a kilo of flour, and festive versions push to forty, with no whites at all, or almost none. Ordinary fresh egg pasta uses one whole egg per hundred grams of flour, which works out to about ten eggs a kilo.

What that does is turn the dough deep orange, make it elastic enough to roll almost translucent, and give it a flavour rich enough to carry a sauce of nothing but melted butter. The strands are cut by hand, one to two millimetres wide, by rolling the sheet into a loose log and slicing it with a knife.

They are the first course of the Langhe, the Roero and the Monferrato, and from October to December they are the dish white truffle gets grated onto, because nothing else is as good a stage for it.

Overwhelmingly of egg, in the best possible way. Tajarin dressed with nothing but butter taste custardy, rich and faintly sweet, with a silkiness on the tongue that a standard egg pasta does not have.

The texture is delicate rather than chewy. Because the strands are so thin and the dough so dry, they cook in about ninety seconds and end up tender with the barest resistance: you do not bite tajarin so much as let them collapse.

With white truffle over the top the pasta effectively disappears and becomes a warm, buttery carrier for the aroma, which is the entire point. With a sauce made from roasting juices, the traditional country dressing, the yolks and the meat fond combine into something considerably more savoury than the ingredient list suggests.

Cook them in a lot of well-salted boiling water for sixty to ninety seconds. That is not a typo. They are thin enough that thirty extra seconds turns them soft, and there is no rescuing them.

Have the sauce ready and hot in a wide pan before the pasta goes in the water. Drain the tajarin while they still look slightly underdone, move them into the pan with a splash of cooking water, and toss for fifteen seconds to coat.

The canonical dressing is melted butter with a few sage leaves and a restrained amount of grated Parmigiano. For white truffle, do exactly that and then shave the truffle at the table with a truffle slicer. Never cook it, since heat destroys the aroma in seconds.

The country version, and arguably the better one, is sugo d'arrosto: the strained, degreased pan juices from a Sunday roast or a Barolo-braised beef. Other traditional sauces are a white ragù of Bra veal sausage, sautéed chicken livers, and porcini in season. Tomato is not used, and in the Langhe you will never see it offered.

Fresh tajarin hold two days in the refrigerator, spread as loose nests on a floured tray under a cloth, well separated so they do not weld. Vacuum trays from a pasta shop run to the date printed on them, usually about a week, and go quickly once the seal is broken. What happens if they sit is straightforward: the strands keep giving up water at the surface and taking it in where they touch, so a piled heap fuses into a single lump while the outside turns brittle and snaps.

Freezing is the reliable route. Set the nests apart on a tray, freeze them solid, then bag them for up to two months and drop them into boiling water still frozen, where they take about two minutes. Home-drying works too, on a rack in a dry room for a day and then a month in a sealed jar, though a dough this rich in yolk carries a lot of fat and its aroma flattens with time. Raw dough keeps a day wrapped in the refrigerator and rolls better on the second day. Dates belong to the pack and the maker.

Colour is the fastest read. Tajarin made with a proper load of yolks comes out orange-gold rather than pale yellow, and pasta that looks like ordinary supermarket tagliatelle was made with few yolks or with whole eggs. Then the cut: a strand should be about as thick as a flattened hair and one or two millimetres wide, and the strands should not all match, because a knife leaves them slightly uneven and a machine does not. Fresh nests should feel dry and faintly rough rather than tacky, and the strands should pull apart without tearing each other.

On a dried box, find the egg declaration. Italian law needs only four eggs per kilo for the words pasta all'uovo, so the number is what separates the categories: serious tajarin sit at eight to twelve eggs, or state yolks outright, and the good Piedmontese boxes say so on the front. Tagliolini are the machine-cut, whole-egg cousin; tagliatelle are three times as wide; capellini are durum and eggless. Expect 8 to 14 dollars for 250 grams of the yolk-heavy dried kind.

Fresh tajarin rarely travel, so outside Italy the realistic options are dried or homemade. Dried tajarin from Langhe producers (Marabotto, Michelis, Tanda e Nulla among others) reach the US and UK through Italian importers and online specialists such as Gustiamo, Eataly and Ratio in the US, Vorrei and Natoora in the UK. Expect 8 to 14 dollars or £7 to £12 for a 250 g pack.

In Italian cities, any decent pastificio fresco makes them to order; in Piedmont they are in every alimentari. Fresh runs €12 to €18 per kilo in Piedmont and €20 to €26 in Milan or Rome.

If you make them yourself, the shopping list is short and the quality of the eggs is the whole game: free-range or organic yolks, deep orange, are what give tajarin their colour. Use 00 flour, or 00 cut with 20% fine semolina for a little more structure. Buy a truffle slicer if you are serious; a mandoline set to its thinnest will do.

Alba during the International White Truffle Fair, from mid-October to early December, is the headline event, and it comes with the headline prices and queues.

The villages around it are better value and often better cooking: Neive, Barbaresco, Treiso, La Morra, Monforte d'Alba, Serralunga d'Alba. The osterie here roll tajarin by hand every morning, and the roasting-juice sauce comes from their own braise.

Across the Tanaro in the Roero (Canale, Vezza d'Alba, Govone) the same pasta costs less and the dining rooms are quieter. In Bra, the home of the raw veal sausage, ask for tajarin with salsiccia di Bra.

Turin is the practical starting point. Historic trattorias in the Quadrilatero and San Salvario serve them year-round, usually with butter and sage or a meat sauce, and it is a good place to calibrate before heading into the hills.