Tagliatelle with mushroom sauce.
One of the tastiest and simplest sauces there is: mushroom sauce, this time seasoning a nice plate of tagliatelle.
This is the recipe and Loris' anecdotes:
Dried mushroom sauce.
This sauce, very different from the one made with fresh mushrooms, is part of the inland tradition.
Nowadays you can see tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms on the menus of certain restaurants but, at least in the hinterland of the Riviera di Levante, these are the excellent tagliatelle with dried mushrooms that are part of the old tradition of these parts and are made with the addition of tomato sauce. Therefore, apart from being in mushroom season, if this dish is served without tomato, the mushrooms used are certainly frozen, perhaps with the addition of a few pieces of dried ones to give them a little more aroma.
Years ago I had a friend from Santo Stefano d'Aveto, now deceased, who was a great trader of dried mushrooms and it is difficult to imagine what a large market there is behind this product... I remember that this friend had a refrigerated warehouse where he kept tons of dried mushrooms that came from all over Europe and that he also kept for many months to sell them when the season and the prices were more favorable.
Now many anecdotes related to mushrooms come to mind but I don't want to bore you with these memories of mine. A particular memory is from many years ago when I was in Sicily doing my military service and I had a Calabrian comrade whose family traded in fresh mushrooms. Once, during a short leave, I went with him to his village, Stilo, at a warehouse of his family there were tons of fresh mushrooms that were brought by the locals. The mushrooms were divided by size, quality, type and then treated by wise women who prepared them to be taken to the city and sent to the markets, others were prepared to be put in oil and others were dried. Evidently, in the early seventies, there was not yet the possibility and culture of freezing.
Here, in many restaurants in the first hinterland, excellent dishes of tagliatelle with dried mushrooms (with tomato) are served, as an alternative to the traditional dishes of ravioli with Genoese ragù or pansotti with walnut sauce.
The recipe for making the sauce with dried mushrooms is very simple.
First of all you need good quality mushrooms and it is not essential to choose the most expensive ones but the most fragrant ones. I leave the dried mushrooms to soak for a short time in cold water, which I change after a couple of minutes to eliminate any residue of soil and leaves and replace it with more cold water. Separately I fry in the right amount of extra virgin olive oil a little finely chopped onion, a head of garlic, a lightly chopped rosemary and a couple of bay leaves. I then add the mushrooms soaked in the water and chopped to the soffritto. As soon as the mushrooms have warmed up I bathe them lightly with a little white wine, add the right amount of pureed tomatoes and a little salt. When the sauce begins to brown (it is not a long cooking time) I add, if necessary, a little of the second water in which I soaked the dried mushrooms. At the end, I measure and adjust the salt and add a very finely chopped parsley.
I also like to add a little hot chili pepper to the soffritto.
Photo taken with Canon 600D and lens Canon EF 40.