In the morning, with 40° in summer or cold in winter, the women from the old part of the city of Bari -in Arco Basso street as the area is known- they take out the tables and wooden boards to knead, and start working.
Do a small volcano with semolina flour, add warm water with small streams and mix it with full force that they hold in their arms until the dough acquires the consistency that only they know how to give to that spectacular ball of yellow mixture.
In the presence of tourists who come from all over the world -many get off the cruise ships that moor in the port of the city located in the heel of the boot that is shaped like the peninsula- that is when the real show begins: helped with a knife transform the dough into thousands of “orecchiette” what is the name of the ear-shaped noodle: “A very old tradition that we cannot let die and become extinct” tells us Nunzia Caputo, the symbol of culinary tradition and one of the ladies who every day on the sidewalk of her birth house kneads the pasta that reigns on the tables of southern Italy.
The paste of the taco de la bota
The city of bari, on the shores of Adriatic sea, is the capital of the apulia Region, With a population of 300 thousand inhabitants, it is the place where you can witness the rite of preparing the “orecchiette” that characterizes the gastronomy of the southern part of the country.
The old borgo of the city is hardly reached “Arco Basso” ladies meet Nunzia, Angela, Martawho have consecrated their lives -like a priesthood- to this centuries-old tradition of producing fresh pasta by hand in the shape of an “ear”, a laborious job to which they have dedicated their entire lives and to which they are committed so that the tradition does not end that they learned from their first years of life, today they sell 1/2 kg packages for 2.5 euros and they recommend not boiling them for more than six minutes to eat them al dente.
From Lonley Planet to Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and Sylvester Stallone…
The centuries-old tradition of homemade pasta makers has long been an attraction for tourists because they work in the narrow streets of the old town where they display looms and wooden tables with fresh pasta. So much so that, In addition to being included in the “top ten” of the best destinations in Europe in the Lonley Planet guide, they were also chosen by Dolce & Gabbana as the setting for some of their advertisements together with the daughters of Sylvester Stallone. who played with the little pasta creations in their hands.
Not only that, even Versace has discovered how successful the combination of models and orecchiette.
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They knead from a very young age
They learned to knead from a very young age -when they still used a pacifier and took a bottle- and every day they turn to this trade that imposed many sacrifices on them. “My mother taught me when she was very young,” Ángela Amoruso tells Ámbito.
“Before going to school, I had to help her place the boards on the sidewalk of my house and prepare the dough,” she recalls. Angela who is now 68 years old and who works with his daughter-in-law Marta.
With 40 degrees of heat and sheltering from the sun with umbrellas outside his house, Nunzia squeezes a knife between her hands with which she cuts the strips of dough into a small pieceas if he were going to make a gnocchi, he drags it on the board until he creates a hole and with the help of his thumb he turns it around to obtain the typical concave shape of an ear that this pasta represents.
Source: Ambito
