Discovering couscous made with pasta

The dessert, inspired by Campania’s pastiera, is also a wordplay expressing the disappearing of pasta, namely of spaghettoni, which are roughly chopped using a cutter so as to resemble a “couscous”.

Past-era

Recipe for 6 people

INGREDIENTS
for the couscous pasta
150 g spaghettoni (thick spaghetti)

for the artichokes
100 g clean artichokes
100 g caprino cheese
15 g flour
25 g brown sugar
50 g honeydew
100 g cream
250 g milk
250 g water
4 g gelatine sheet
a few mint leaves
1/2 flower of star anise

for the cream
40 g sugar
2 egg yolks
60 g semi-whipped cream
60 g milk
2 g grated fresh ginger

for the candied vegetables

100 g baby carrots
100 g celery
100 g sugar
50 g fructose
250 g water
1/2 star anise
3 cloves
1/2 bay leaf

for the hazelnut brittle
100 g toasted hazelnuts
50 g sugar
15 ml water

for the ice-cream
2 g carob flour
40 g sugar
100 g fresh cream
150 ml fresh milk
10 g heather honey
30 g fresh fennel
3 g fennel flowers

METHOD
for the couscous
Roughly chop the raw spaghettoni with a cutter, so as to obtain a rough couscous. Cook them in lightly salted boiling water for 23 minutes. Drain them well and blend the couscous until you obtain a smooth dough. Place this onto two sheets of baking paper and roll it out with a rolling-pin until it is 1-2 mm thick. Put the dough into a preheated oven and bake at 50°C for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, cut out 12 squares of around 10x10 cm and roll each square around a 2.5x12 cm cylinder mould then bake at 180°C for 6 minutes. Leave to cool and carefully remove the cannoli from the moulds.

for the artichokes
Cook the whole artichokes with the milk, water, flour, honeydew, mint and star anise on a moderate flame for 30 minutes. Drain them and leave them to cool, then put them into a pan with the sugar in order to caramelize them. Cut them into a brunoise.

for the cream

Bring the milk, cream and ginger to 90°C and then filter the mixture. Mix the egg yolks with the sugar, add them to the milk, reduce the heat to 60°C. Leave to cool down until the mixture reaches 4°C. Add half of the artichokes to the cream and cook in the oven in a Bain-Marie at 130°C for 30 minutes. Sieve the mixture, add the drained gelatine sheet, and leave to cool until it reaches 4°C. Add the caprino cheese to the mixture, then the cream and finally the remaining artichokes. Leave in the fridge for 30 minutes.

for the candied vegetables
Blanch the vegetables in separate groups leaving them crispy. Prepare a syrup by bringing the water, sugar, fructose, anise, cloves and bay leaf to 85°C, then leave the mixture to cool. Soak the vegetables in the syrup and then bake them in the oven at 50°C for about 6 hours.

for the hazelnut brittle
Bring the sugar and water to 119°C, add the hazelnuts and cook them until the mixture starts to caramelize (at around 140°C). Remove from the heat, put into a mould in the shape of a parallelepiped and freeze.

for the moretto ice-cream
Leave half of the fennel leaves in infusion in the cream for 12 hours. Filter the cream and add the milk, sugar, honey, carob, the remaining fennel leaves and the fennel flowers and mix. Process the mixture in the ice-cream machine. Divide the ice-cream into 6 oval moulds, put a wood stick in the middle and freeze.

COMPOSING THE DISH
Remove the moretto ice-creams from the moulds and pass them into the grated hazelnut brittle. Fill the cannoli with the artichoke cream, put them on the plate with the moretto ice-cream on a side and the candied vegetables.

See also
There's a couscous under my pasta by Eugenio Boer