Italy’s rarest pasta

[ff_]

As a Sardinian this is the first time ever I hear of this pasta, and I'm truly shocked of how it's made, it really sounds like lots of work.

Now I'm super curious about it, but the preparation in sheep broth and pecorino is one of the best combinations to have with pasta IMHO, very promising.

Btw if you've never been to Sardinia make sure you visit at least once in life, you won't regret it :)

[tronje]

Do you think Su Filindeu tastes much different from any other pasta prepared with sheep broth and pecorino? It seems like it should, given the huge amount of work going into it, but since the ingredients are so simple, it also seems like it shouldn't make a huge difference...

[ezequiel-garzon]

As an aside, if you don't mind, how close is Sardo to Latin? Can you rather easily read Latin texts (assuming you haven't studied Latin, and are proficient in Sardo). Thanks!

[jdprt]

I'm heading there next summer for a couple of weeks. Could you recommend some must do places to see, things to do? Would be really interested to hear from your perspective.

[ythl]

Gotta have that Sard worm-cheese

[smegel]

How is Sardinia different to mainland Italy?

[beat]

This makes me think strongly of Matthew B. Crawford's books ("The World Beyond Your Head", "Shop Class as Soulcraft"). He focuses directly on difficult techniques like this, things that require both intellectual focus and physical technique to master - craftsmanship. He believes that this is the finest work we can do. Pure intellectual abstraction doesn't exercise our minds fully, we need to engage with the physical world and its complexities as well.

Think about it - this is so incredibly sensitive to the exact consistency of the pasta dough, it must change by temperature, humidity, time of day, barometric pressure... to make it work, she just has to feel the pasta, to know pasta in a way that can only be done with years of manual effort.

That's why they can't build a machine to do it. They can't control the conditions well enough.

[Shivetya]

I fail to believe such a machine cannot be made. I do however believe it may not be economical to do so. If it can be measured then why cannot it be reproduced? None of the values you listed cannot be measured and accounted for.

She has three listed ingredients, however I am curious how much perspiration is in the final product, surely her hands impart something through the skin contact.

Finally the drying process would have its own effect, after preparing it how much of a difference is there between it and another pasta? What exactly do they consider the differences? Is it purely texture, if so then just the preparation of the final dish can affect what you will perceive

[gakada]

Blocked in the UK. Can someone help us read our own website?

Edit: why is this at -3? You guys are assholes.

[antirez]

You downvoted since our machine learning algorithm predicted you were about to call us assholes.

[OJFord]

It's not hosted on "our own website" - our licence fee isn't paying for it, neither is HM Government; hence we cannot read it because the BBC cannot engage in commercial activity - I assume it has ads, or maybe a paywall - in the UK.

> BBC WORLDWIDE IS THE MAIN COMMERCIAL ARM AND A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION (BBC). OUR VISION IS TO BUILD THE BBC'S BRANDS, AUDIENCES, COMMERCIAL RETURNS AND REPUTATION ACROSS THE WORLD.

> BBC Worldwide helps keep the Licence Fee as low as possible, returning £222.2m to the BBC in the last financial year, an increase of 17.6% from 2014/15, adjusted for disposals, and equivalent to 13.0% of BBC Television content funding in the year.

Why, though, they don't duplicate the content with the IP-restriction instead of paywall/ads/whatever it is, I'm not quite sure.

[kenny_r]

I found another link [0] to the article at the bbc.co.uk domain but it seems to immediately redirect to the article hosted at bbc.com.

[0] www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01gns25

[cheiVia0]

Try any of these:

Tor Browser archive.is archive.org Google cache Bing cache Coral cache

[esistgut]

Did you try Google Cache?

[chewxy]

have they tried getting chinese la mien chefs to duplicate her work?

Also relevant: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299605105_The_Compu...

[jimworm]

Without knowing exactly what is required for making su filindeu, the video of Paola Abraini looks to me a lot like a la mian maker in training. I wouldn't be too surprised if a la mian chef picks it up right away and starts making su filindeu ten times faster than she does, instantly turning the "rarest pasta in the world" into "a pasta from Sardinia".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHGZLjJ1CAk&t=40s

[thechao]

In the spirit of famous-English-chefs-unable-to-make-thin-noodles, here's Gordon Ramsay unable to make la mian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaeyFyQemDw

[hwayern]

I'm actually incredibly interested to know if su filindeu is historically linked to la mian in any way (apart from the obvious pasta came from China argument)

[davidw]

If you've never had handmade pasta in Italy, you're missing out.

My mother in law makes ravioli by hand for special occasions:

* She mixes the flour, water and salt * That is then spread out into sheets with the help of a hand-cranked machine. * She then uses a cutting roller to cut those into the right shapes. * Then the filling (mix of greens) goes into each one by hand and it's closed up. * They get cooked. * At the end they get a healthy bunch of ragù (bolognese meat sauce, if you must) on them.

I feel guilty eating them, because it takes hours and hours to do all that, and then it's gone in a few minutes it seems like.

[eliot_stein]

Hello! Author of the story here. Really appreciate all the interest and wanted to jump in on a few questions in the thread.

Taste? It's delicious. The pasta is so thin that it really melts in your mouth. I've tasted it many times now and think that the trick is to not put in too much pecorino.

Sardo? As many Sardi on this thread have correctly pointed out, Sardo is a separate language from Italian, as opposed to a dialect. Like Italian, Romansch, and Spanish, it's rooted in Latin. There are many variations of it and each region speaks a different version. Barbaricino (what they speak around Nuoro) is considered the least Italian-ized version of it. There are more than 500 words that are nearly identical to Latin (domus, janna, etc) with more distant words (stemming from Sardinia's earliest indigenous population) that often refer to geological formations or animals (giara, marxani, nuraghe, etc).

[znpy]

What I am about to say is no solution, but: I can't quite understand why don't people don't begin by trying and make a basic YouTube video about this subject.

Don't want the tradition to fade? Spread it as much as possible.

[unwind]

Sure.

Here's Jamie Oliver attempting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHGZLjJ1CAk (this might be the video linked in the article, that one failed for me). It doesn't seem very easy.

[gpderetta]

As per the article, Abraini has been filmed so that the technique can be preserved, at least partially, although it seems hard to replicate.

[draugadrotten]

> In the last few years, Italy’s premier food and wine magazine, Gambero Rosso, has invited her to Rome twice so they can film her preparing the dish.

[rjdevereux]

Video of it being made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuRLaO1G5A0

[maxpolun]

Sounds like a similar process to hand-pulled cotton candy, just with pasta instead of sugar.

here's how to make that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auRNHI2nkIU

[gotofritz]

A lot of embellishments in the article.

The pasta can be found at the San Francesco di Lula festival, which can be comfortably reached by car. Only a few pilgrims may do it on foot, some barefoot, as a form of devotion, but these days it's increasingly rarer

[microcolonel]

>Last year, a team of engineers from Barilla pasta came to see if they could reproduce her technique with a machine. They couldn’t.

You can tell that Eliot is a pessimist; because if they couldn't design a mechanism to make this pasta on the first visit, it must be impossible!

Admittedly though, it does seem like a lot of work.

[yoz-y]

I find it quite annoying that many outlets (be it articles, TV documentaries or tourist guides) always try to point out how something arcane can not be reproduced by modern technology or that the "knowledge has been lost". But it seems like people like the narrative.

[vinayan3]

With all the talk of the loss of manufacturing jobs maybe they can instead talk about making this pasta. It might get some people to start producing it in the US.

[gondo]

The name of the pasta in the article is: Su Filindeu

[namaemuta]

Do you think the process could be automatized? from my naive perspective, that doesn't seem a tremendously difficult task.

[gpderetta]

From the article:

"Last year, a team of engineers from Barilla pasta came to see if they could reproduce her technique with a machine. They couldn’t"

[jstoja]

It seems to me, but the main question is... would it be useful?

[scythe]

If I wanted to replicate this, I'd try to get a machine to make the strands and then lay them by hand. Laying pasta that thin in an accurate way with a robotic arm requires amazing computer vision and such, but pulling dough in exactly this certain way is machineworthy.

[hexane360]

I'd almost expect the opposite. According to the article, most of the difficult comes from managing the consistency of the dough. Salt water and water need to be added throughout the pulling process to prevent tearing. The laying process could probably be achieved by a loom-like machine: thread the string around knobs at the edge of the disc, and then cut around the outside.

[kolokolo]

And all I can think of is stupid greentext about Pepe.

[Walf]

Well they probably do crack the tiniest bit of rare pepe on their rare pasta. (Pepe is Italian for pepper.)

[Grangar]

>su filindeu falling out of my pocket

[FireBeyond]

[deleted] I'm guilty of only reading half the article.

[emodendroket]

Bit out of the way for me in Massachusetts but looks delicious.

[longwave]

Google cache to the rescue for UK users:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_Uzr_k0...

[conjectures]

Thanks. But more generally WTH? How does their policy make any sense?

For non uk people: """BBC Worldwide (International Site)

We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com. """