Trofie with Pesto, Potatoes and Green Beans (Trofie al Pesto Genovese)

// SUPPLY LIST

// OPERATIONS

1. 1 Make the trofie dough: mix the 300 g tipo 00 with the 100 g semola on a board, dissolve the 4 g fine salt in the 200 ml water at about 40C/104F, and work the water in a little at a time until the flour gathers into shaggy lumps. Knead firmly for 10 minutes until the dough is smooth, matte and stiff — the feel of modelling clay, with a thumbprint that closes only slowly. At 50 per cent hydration this dough is meant to be dry and hard work, so expect it to look crumbly for the first few minutes and keep kneading rather than reaching for more flour; only if it still refuses to come together after five minutes should you wet your hands or add water 5 ml at a time, and only if it feels tacky or slack should you work in another 10-20 g of semola, because a wet dough will not hold its twist and the trofie unravel into limp worms in the pot. Wrap tightly and rest at room temperature for 30 minutes so the gluten relaxes enough to roll.
2. 2 Shape the trofie, keeping the rest of the dough wrapped so it cannot skin over: roll a piece into a pencil-thick rope and pinch off chickpea-sized pieces of about 3 g. On an unfloured wooden board — flour makes the dough slide instead of grip, and it will never take a spiral — press each piece under the outer edge of your palm and push it away from you diagonally, letting it stretch and roll into a 3-4 cm spindle with tapered ends and a visible twist; scatter them onto a tray dusted with the extra semola in a single layer, never piled, or they weld to each other. Allow about 45 minutes for the whole batch and do not chase uniformity, since the fresh trofie sold in Genoa are not identical either. The universally accepted shortcut is 400 g of good dried trofie from a Ligurian producer, in which case skip straight to the basil and follow the dried timings in the boiling step.
3. 3 Prepare the basil, which is the step people rush and regret: use only small young leaves, discarding the stems and anything bigger than your thumbnail, because big coarse leaves carry the minty note that makes pesto taste of toothpaste. Dip the leaves in cold water, swirl once, lift them straight out and spread them in a single layer on a clean tea towel for about 15 minutes until bone dry, patting rather than rubbing. Water left clinging to the leaves splits the emulsion and turns the sauce grey-brown, and any leaf you bruise, tear or chop starts oxidising before it ever reaches the mortar.
4. 4 Start the pesto in a room-temperature marble mortar with a wooden pestle, never a metal one: crush the 2 garlic cloves with a few grains of the 3 g coarse salt for about 1 minute, until they are a smooth white cream with no visible pieces. Add the 30 g pine nuts and pound for a further 2-3 minutes to a pale, sticky paste that clings to the pestle and smells sweet and resinous — the pine nuts are the body of this sauce, and skimping on them leaves a thin pesto that tastes mostly of garlic. Refuse the food processor here if you possibly can, since the blade cuts and warms where the pestle crushes and smears: machine pesto tastes thinner, greys within the hour and carries a metallic bitterness. If you own no mortar, freeze the goblet and blade for 30 minutes, pulse in 3-second bursts with the oil already in, and stop while it is still slightly coarse.
5. 5 Add the 60 g basil in three handfuls with the rest of the coarse salt, and do not pound it: press the pestle against the wall of the mortar and rotate it in a steady circular grinding motion while your other hand turns the mortar the opposite way. Work for 5-8 minutes, adding the next handful only once the last has collapsed, until you have a bright grass-green cream with no recognisable leaf fragments and a brilliant green liquid pooling around the pestle — that liquid is the cue that the leaves have been smeared open rather than crushed shut. The coarse salt is the abrasive doing the work; hammering straight down bruises the leaves and gives you a dark, bitter sauce instead of a sweet one.
6. 6 Work in the 55 g Parmigiano and the 25 g Fiore Sardo with the pestle until they are fully absorbed and the paste stiffens, then trickle in the 75 ml room-temperature olive oil in a thin stream, stirring in the same circular motion, until the sauce is glossy, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and slow to drop off it. Taste: it should be sweetly herbal and salty from the cheese, never bitter or aggressively garlicky — bitterness means a peppery non-Ligurian oil, overworked basil, or too much garlic. Leave it in the mortar at room temperature under a thin film of oil and use it within 2 hours; it must never be heated, and it should not go into the fridge before serving, where the fat sets hard and the flavour goes dull.
7. 7 Bring 5 litres of water to a rolling boil (100C/212F) in a tall 6-8 litre pot — the pasta and vegetables together weigh over a kilo, and a smaller volume drops off the boil and turns gluey — and salt it with only 30 g of coarse salt, about 6 g per litre and noticeably less than you would use for a tomato sauce, because the pesto already brings 3 g of salt and 80 g of hard cheese to the bowl. Tip in the 250 g diced potato and start a timer.
8. 8 At 4 minutes add the 200 g green beans, at 7 minutes add the fresh trofie, and everything finishes together at about 13 minutes; for dried trofie reverse the order, putting the trofie in first at zero, the potato at 1 minute and the beans at 5, so all three come out together at the packet time of 13-15 minutes. The cues are that a trofia bitten in half is chewy-tender with no chalky white core — hand-rolled ones bob to the surface after about 3 minutes and need a further 3 after that — the beans are completely soft and no longer squeak against your teeth, and a potato cube crushes against the side of the pot but still holds its shape. Ligurian beans and potatoes are cooked right through rather than al dente, and the starch the potato sheds is part of what will make the sauce cling. Ladle out 250 ml of the cloudy cooking water before you drain anything.
9. 9 Warm a wide serving bowl by swirling a ladle of the boiling water around it and tipping it out, then dry it, because a cold bowl chills the oil and the sauce goes claggy. Scrape in the pesto with the optional 10 g of softened butter and slacken it with 3-4 tbsp (45-60 ml) of the reserved cooking water, stirring to a pourable cream. Let that water stand off the heat for a minute first: water at a full boil poured straight onto pesto scrambles the cheese into strings and stews the basil dull.
10. 10 Lift the pasta and vegetables out with a spider, or drain them for no more than 5 seconds, and tip them into the bowl still visibly wet. Toss hard with a wooden spoon for 30-45 seconds, lifting from the bottom, until every spiral is coated and the sauce pools creamy rather than oily around the potato, adding the remaining cooking water a tablespoon at a time if it looks tight. Draining bone dry is the classic failure: with no starchy water the emulsion breaks and the oil slides off into the bottom of the bowl. Never return the bowl or the pan to the heat.
11. 11 Serve within a minute of tossing, into warm rather than scalding bowls, so the basil aroma reads instead of cooking off; this is a dish with no resting time at all. Pass extra grated Parmigiano at the table but no black pepper, which flattens the basil, and drink a cold Vermentino or Pigato from the Riviera di Ponente alongside. Any leftover pesto keeps for 3 days pressed into a jar under a film of oil in the fridge, brought back to room temperature before use, and it freezes well if you leave the cheese out and beat that in after thawing.

// CLASSIFICATIONS