Pizzoccheri?? What kind of pizza is that? Oh wait, it’s not a pizza – the recipe’s got Swiss chard, potatoes, some garlic, sage and two kinds of cheese. Pizzoccheri is the name of a variety of pasta, and guess what, I’ve got to make it. Well, at least I’m going to be getting more use out of my new pasta machine.
Buckwheat flour, unbleached flour, 3 eggs, salt, milk and water – the ingredients in making pizzoccheri. I had to visit a couple of shops to find buckwheat flour. The final result will be flat noodles about 3″ x 1″.

I’ve planted Swiss chard & potatoes in my garden – but they aren’t ready for the recipe this time – in mid-June, when I first tried this recipe. That’s the Swiss chard in the large measuring cup in the photo below. This was also my first experience with Fontina cheese (red wedge).

This recipe calls for lots of boiling water for cooking the Swiss chard & potatoes for several minutes, and only a few seconds for the fresh pasta before everything is transferred to an oven-to-table dish, coated with garlic/sage butter, topped with cheese ……

….. then baked in an oven for five minutes.

The most difficult stage of this recipe for me is making the pasta. I am still quite a novice and this was one of my first attempts. While I noticed a big improvement in my technique from a couple of earlier efforts, my resulting noodles wouldn’t win high marks from the judges for aesthetics. Pizzoccheri doesn’t conform to many of my assumptions about pasta dishes, but Marcella explains that is a regional dish from the northern part of Italy, near the Swiss border. I think it would be an excellent fall or early winter dish to prepare when I can use more ingredients from my garden. It was very good.