Semolina Flour

Basbousa is a semolina cake that's soft, dense, and flecked with texture throughout.

These date-filled cookies—qrass bil-tamr—are a typical Ramadan sweet, offered to guests and snacked on during the night before the fast begins again at dawn.

Maamoul are delicate pastries—filled with pistachios, walnuts, or dates—that are served on special occasions like Eid Al-Fitr and Easter.

Meet mlaoui—msemen’s rebellious younger brother—a flaky skillet-fried Moroccan flatbread.

These lacy pancakes are cooked only on one side, which gives them an incredibly light and delicate texture.

These fermented griddle bread have the comforting flavor of an English muffin with a touch of whole grains. The nooks and crannies make them a perfect vessel for sweet and savory spreads.

These pistachio- and almond-studded sweets are made with semolina and ghee. Eat the halva hot and soft out of the frying pan, or press it into a cake tin and cut it into squares.

This recipe makes a lot of ragù, but it freezes well and is worth having around. If making the gnocchi feels like a project, serve over polenta instead.

Moist, marzipan-y mini cakes win weeknight desserts, afternoon snacks, and weekend picnics.

Rolling out and shaping this handmade pasta together is the fun part. Make the dough a day ahead, wrap in plastic, and keep chilled.

This egg-less pasta dough—perfect for hand made shapes, like orrechiette, cavatelli and pici—quickly comes together in the food processer. For an even easier approach, use a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook and let the machine do all the kneading.

If you're making this entire menu in a single oven, put the souffléed gnocchi in the oven to bake after the fennel and carrots have been roasting for 10 minutes.

Channel your inner nonna while making this stunning pasta. It's a project, but it's worth it.

A departure from the more common potato gnocchi, these light, pillowy rounds feature semolina and are baked instead of boiled. Parmesan cheese and a glaze of butter make them quite rich and delicious. They go well with meat or poultry but you can also top the gnocchi with your favorite tomato sauce or pesto.

One day I swear I'm going to take gnudi off the menu at The Pig. We'll probably end up closing down, because it's one of the most popular items on the menu. Yet it might be worth the risk—it's been seven years of sheer hell making these little things. For cooks without a restaurant to run, though, gnudi are a dream. They're extremely simple—just a mixture of ricotta and Parmesan formed into stubby dumplings, then coated with semolina flour. They hang out in the fridge until the moisture in the ricotta has fused with the semolina to form a delicate skin. But when you must have them ready every day for service, it's another story. They're so temperamental—sometimes they're ready to cook after a day in the fridge, sometimes it takes two or three. I often jump the gun, cooking them too early and tearing my hair out as I watch them fall apart in the water. At home, though, there's no need to rush the process. It's easy to get right, as long as you give them three days to develop that skin—but not much longer or the skin will get too dense. In the spring, I'll occasionally leave out the brown butter and spoon Basil Pesto here and there.

This dough is more toothsome than any of our other pasta dough because it is fortified with semolina, a by-product of milling durum wheat flour, which is what the majority of dried pasta is made of. We use it to make orecchiette and pici, both of which need a strong dough to hold their shape.

Pici are long, hand-rolled strands from the Montalcino area of Tuscany, not far from my house. Also called umbrichella, this pasta is the most typical shape in my region, so naturally I wanted to serve it at Mozza. Although it is not a regular item on the menu, we often use pici in place of the gnocchi in the Gnocchi with Duck Ragù (page 187).

A technique that is unique to this bread is the use of a cooked flour paste, made the day before. The gelatinized starches release flavors, giving this bread a distinct quality.

Piana degli Albanesi is the name of the city settled half a millennium ago when a band of oppressed Albanesi took flight from the Turks and, with the permission of Giovanni II, the then Spanish viceroy in Sicily, took refuge in the countryside near Palermo. A somewhat unmingled populace, cleaving still to its heritage, they perpetuate, in full dress and with great ebullience, the story of their gastronomy. And yet it is a fornaio, a baker, there who makes one of the finest examples of the traditional bread of Sicily. Heavy, cakelike in its wet, golden crumb, its crust is thick, hard, wood-scorched. And to cradle a hunk of it in one’s hand is to hold a piece of the ages, it seems. Insofar as things like this can be carried from one part of the world to another, here follows his formula.

If I were given the task of choosing one bread from all the bakers of Italy, one that I could eat everyday and forever, it would be the golden-fleshed bread of Altamura, its thick skin, parched, crackled, its form a fat, crisped heart, cleaved nearly in two.

...Anchovies, and Black Olives) Brindisi, the ancient Brundisium of the Romans, is a sort of rough, emotionally bankrupt port city. Still, we like to walk and sit, sometimes, on the edges of its rickety old wharfs early of a morning to inhale the bright, briny tableau of the place. And round about eight-thirty—high noon for the fishermen, who rise before the sun—we wait to see the baker’s boy running down the docks, toting a great basket of puddica—traditional Brindisino flatbreads—just born and sending up great hungering perfumes for the fishermen’s lunch. It seemed to us the highest form of ceremony left in the dour old place.

I have a well-deserved reputation as an olive oil junkie. I use olive oil in most dishes, and not with a light hand. When my regular customers saw this dessert on the menu, they thought I’d gone too far—until they tasted it. The oil takes the place of butter and makes for an incredibly moist crumb. It’s delicious with candied oranges and whipped cream, or by itself in the afternoon with a cup of tea. Or if you’re a chocolate lover, try a slice drizzled with the chocolate sauce from the ,meringues recipe on pages 159–160.