Just like the opposite three bowls on the highest shelf, the wood salad bowl is full. Nonetheless, not like the opposite bowls, with their decide’n’combine of garments pegs, cash, aspirin, Ikea pencils, cables, moist wipes, sun shades, enterprise playing cards, Kinder Shock figures and Sellotape chewed by the canine, the salad bowl is a holding (or dumping) place for only one factor: bread crusts. In Italian, the crust of a loaf of bread is typically known as il culo or culetto, which means backside or little backside, making this a bowl of bottoms.
Its place on the best shelf, plus the depth of the bowl, means I can’t be reminded of what’s inside till there are sufficient crusts that they begin rising, like brown icebergs, above the rim. Then follows a interval of days (or weeks) throughout which I hold seeing these suggestions, and reminding myself to do one thing with them, however don’t, in order that they proceed to rise, and when the morning solar hits the cabinets, I can see the mud drifting and settling. Ultimately, I take the bowl down from the shelf and study the contents; it then sits on the desk for a day or two earlier than I make breadcrumbs, ideally drying the already-dry bread in a low oven, which makes it brittle and reduces to crumbs extra simply. (Lower than ideally suited is placing them straight right into a meals processor, which has a rattle worse than a set of keys within the washer, and produces uneven crumbs.)
The bowl had been untouched for months when it yielded 4 ziplock luggage of uneven crumbs, which I attempted to place within the freezer together with different luggage of crumbs, however realised I wanted another choice for the contents of the salad bowl. The reply got here from Emilia-Romagna, the place the pasta tradition isn’t solely an enriched one in every of lasagne and of pork and parmesan tortellini bobbing in a broth, however a resourceful one in every of pastas made with leftover bread. This makes such good sense: bread is flour and water and, because it dries (and loses water), its elastic kind returns to a floury kind that may be diminished to crumbs, or soaked and squished right into a malleable dough.
Maybe the most effective identified of those shapes are passatelli, that are made by urgent a breadcrumb, parmesan and egg dough by means of a perforated spoon straight into broth. An much more resourceful form is the bread, flour and water gnocchi-like pisarei, which interprets (in response to the meals historian Oretta Zanini de Vita) as child willies. Oretta additionally notes that historic pasta names alluding to genitalia will not be uncommon, which additionally makes me rethink these multicoloured luggage of pasta offered in reward retailers. Pisarei even have a sacred title: cazzetti d’angelo, or angels’ willies.
Again to the leftover bread, which is the start line. Weigh it, taking into account you need about 300g for 4 individuals and that you’re going to use equal elements bread, water and flour. Break (or lower) the bread into bits, cowl with an equal quantity of water, then depart to sit down. After about 20 minutes, squeeze the bread (it ought to by now be comfortable and pulpy); if it nonetheless feels a bit lumpy, add a bit of extra water and wait a couple of minutes extra.
Now add 300g (or an equal quantity of) plain flour and convey all the things collectively right into a agency, malleable dough. Roll the dough right into a 1cm rope, lower it into centimetre-long nuggets, then roll them throughout a butter paddle or the aspect of a grater to get a curve on one aspect and ridges on the opposite.
Prepare dinner the bean-sized pisarei in well-salted boiling water for about 5 minutes; their puffy, buoyant nature is a reminder that they comprise bread. Historically, pisarei are served with beans cooked in a bit of tomato sauce, which has pretty symmetry, with the beans sitting within the curve and the sauce clinging to the ridges. Alternate options are vegetable ragu, sausage ragu or mushy broccoli – that’s, broccoli boiled till comfortable after which cooked once more with olive oil.
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