Fregola - One of Sardinia’s many culinary gems

I have always loved to cook, and I do so EVERY weekend (I love it too much maybe - I’m actually trying to cook less, but thus far with little success), and since my philosophy is that wine and food should never be separated, I thought that I’d begin doing a bit of writing about food, and its interface with wine…so here’s the first…

I like to cook themed dinners. Not ones where all of the food is red, or begins with the letter “g” and ends with “n”, or re-creates a particular meal depicted in a Hemmingway novel, but rather, and probably more concisely, regionally themed meals. Yesterday’s region was Sardinia.

Sardinia is an island region off of Italy’s west coast. Culturally, liguistically, as well as culinarily, Sardinia is only nominally part of Italy. The Sardi speak a language that though related to Italian, has been determined by linguists to be a distinctive and separate LANGUAGE not just a dialect of Italian. Sardinia is a place that has seen the influences of many cultures across the millennia: Phoenicians, Carthagenians, Greeks, Romans, North Africans, Catalans, etc. These influences, coupled with the insular nature of the place, have made an indelible mark on Sardinia’s kitchen.

One such departure is the Sardinian speciality called fregola (or fregula). Fregola clearly illustrates the Arab influence in Sardinian cooking. Fregola is essentially Sardinia’s answer to, or version of cous cous. Fregola is/are small, dried pellets (for lack of a better word) of semolina that are rolled, dried and then toasted and sold in bags like pasta. Though most fregola currently available is made by machine, there are still those intrepid souls who make it by hand. The classic dish including fregola is is called fregola con arselle AKA fregola with razor clams (which can be very difficult to find, even at EXCELLENT fish mongers). Unlike true “pasta”, fregola is more frequently encountered in a wetter environment than its more shapely cousins - in dishes like soups, “dry soups” and stew-like affairs.

So what I made for our first course was a dish of fregola with chick peas, rock shrimps, and tuna. Now I rarely cook with strict attention to the tyrannies of a recipe (though they certainly have their places as didactic introductions to new ingredients and techniques) but this recipe is forgiving enough to “fudge” it here for you:

INGREDIENTS:

- 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil (Sardinian if you can find it)
- 2 large cloves of garlic, crushed
- 3/4 cup of dried chick peas, soaked overnight (or one can of chick peas). If you use dried chick peas, boil to cook, drain.
- 1 heaping cup of fregola
- pinch of good quality saffron threads, soaked in a couple of ounces of water for several hours
- home-made, or best quality fish stock or chicken broth (about 1 quart or less)
- pinch of red pepper flakes
- 1/2 pound of rock shrimp
- 1 jar of Italian or Spanish tuna preserved in olive oil, drained.
- a few large sprigs of mint, leaves only, chopped
- salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil over medium-low heat.

Fry the garlic until it begins to take on a lightly golden color (do not burn!).

Add the cooked chick peas and cook for two minutes.

Add the fregola and cook for two minutes more.

Add the saffron threads and soaking water and the red pepper flakes.

As you would make a risotto, add the broth little by little, only adding more when the previous few ounces have been absorbed. Unlike making risotto, the broth does not have to be boiling since fregola absorbs moisture and softens much more readiliy than does dried rice.

When the fregola is almost done (taste a few to know - they should ultimately be served al dente like pasta is.) add the rock shrimp and the tuna.

Cook until the shrimp are almost done, then add the chopped mint and adjust salt and pepper. Continue to cook until the shrimp is cooked through. Serve hot, if necessary, adding a bit more broth to achieve the correct liquid level.

IMPORTANT NOTE #1 - The final product should be wet but should NOT be a soup nor should it be sticky or gummy (too dry) - the dish should be JUST liquid enough to warrant using a spoon to eat it.

EVEN MORE IMPORTANT NOTE #2 - DO NOT PUT GRATED CHEESE ON THIS DISH!

So I guess you’re all wondering what one might drink with a dish like this. My thinking on selecting a wine pairing for this went as follows: You’ve got a Sardinian seafood dish, so a Sardinian white is the place to start. But despite the delicateness of the shrimps, one also has to contend with the heartier flavor of tuna as well as the earthy flavors of chick peas, saffron, and the fregola itself, so I opted for a complex, beefy, and slightly exotic IL NURAGHE SEMIDANO DI MOGORO “ANASTASIA” 2005.

Not to toot my own horn, but I and my dinner companions though it was an excellent match…Just FYI, Semidano is an exceedingly rare white grape from southwestern Sardinia, so if you can’t or don’t want to pick up a bottle of this wine through us, choose a complex, balanced, and fairly burly Italian white wine like a Verdicchio or a good Frascati.

If anyone takes a stab at making this dish (poor choice of words?), with or without my wine pairing suggestion, let us know how everything comes out!

TOM CIOCCO