How to Make Pasta with Chickpeas and Saffron!

I'm Rosella. I'm Almerinda. We're from Navelli. And today we're making pasta with chickpeas and saffron. Swagliarella and saffron. There is a window in October and November when the saffron crocus is in bloom. We're filming at the end of the season. Each flower has to be carefully picked. Once Rosella has a basketball, she takes it back to Almerinda. Together they pick off the stigmas of each flower. The stigmas are the spindly red threads, not the yellow stamens. The stigmas have to be gently dried or toasted the day they are collected. Almerinda heaps some hot coals into a bucket and places the sieve with the saffron over it. This is the difference. You have to do it better during the day. It takes 150 flowers to make one gram of dried saffron. The smell of these heaps of stigmas is wonderful. You have to stay close when you dry the saffron. If you don't, you'll lose everything. The other day, this was full of red flowers. This is why saffron is so expensive. The saffron is then kept wrapped in a cloth. In the old days, saffron was kept in a chest of drawers to perfume clothes. These chickpeas were harvested a few weeks ago. It's a regular task for the ladies to pick through the chickpeas, removing any damaged ones. They're now ready to be taken to the kitchen for sale and to be cooked for this pasta. Husband Marco arrives with some freshly picked tomatoes. The chickpeas have doubled in size after soaking for 12 hours in cold water. Almerida likes to get ahead. She keeps balls of sofrito in the freezer. She softens this onion and herb mixture in olive oil. This is around 400 ml of homemade passata. Her soaked chickpeas have come to the boil. She removes the foam with a wooden spoon. Metal spoons, she says, cause a drop in temperature. Next, she warms some local olive oil in a frying pan and sautés some rosemary and two whole garlic cloves. She adds this to the chickpeas, which have already been cooking a while. This flavours the broth. She then adds a chunk of parmesan rind to her other saucepan with the passata for extra umami. While these continue to cook, the ladies make two types of pasta, sagnarelli and gnocchetti. They're using the same dough for both. This is about 500 grams of durum wheat flour and 500 grams of zero flour. Of course, the flour comes from their wheat. Rosella cracks in three eggs and mixes in a little warm water. Almerida's work table has a space for her rolling pin. These are the old one-time tables, where the rolling pin goes in and this goes under. They knead the dough until it is smooth, which takes about 10 minutes. It should rest for at least 30 minutes. I make the sagnarelli, she makes the gnocchetti. Rosella is making gnocchetti, which doesn't involve rolling out a pasta sheet. She makes long ropes of dough and then dices them. Almerida, meanwhile, rolls out a sfoglia for the sagnarelli. It doesn't have to be too thin. She cuts it into strips and then makes pasta battens. A brother, a Santucci brother, from Navelli, who was in Spain, brought the first bulbs. He put the bulbs in the stick. He put them in the stick and brought them to Navelli. And then from here it started. They saw that our land is excellent for cultivating saffron and then our grandparents, our parents, continued cultivating saffron. Then, in winter, they put them in boxes and when they went to mass, they could smell the smell of the cloths, of the coats, of the saffron. Our grandparents were treasures, so they hid them in the boxes where they kept the cloths, the clothes. So, when they wore them, when they went to mass, they could smell the saffron. It had to be dry. So, instead of saffron, the rich people had saffron. Saffron threads shouldn't be added directly to a dish. Almirinda places some in a pan and spoons over a little chickpea broth. She stirs it a little to dissolve and release the flavour. Almirinda cooks the sagnarelli pasta for about three minutes. She adds the pasta to the rosemary-flavoured chickpeas. In a serving bowl, she mixes the chickpeas with the pasta and then spoons in some of the tomato sauce. Lastly, she adds the saffron. And just in case there wasn't enough, they cook the gnocchetti too. This version is more soupy with a little bit more of the tomato sauce. And the ladies are our taste testers today. Sagnarelli e ceci con lo zafferano sono pronte. E adesso li mangiamo. Li assaggiamo per vedere. Ottime! Subscribe for regular helpings of Pasta Grannies. And tune in next week to watch Raimondo make macaroni di busa with walnut sauce.