The chickpea cream with tagliolini and cod that haunts my friends

Chickpea cream with noodles and cod, this is the dish that most represents me and that has been haunting my friends for almost thirty years.

It was the end of the 80s when this dish came to light, a recipe that fully represents the period with its creaminess and velvety taste.

At the time I worked in a starred restaurant and, although I was the head chef, I was also often in the kitchen where they taught me the basics for professional and non-home cooking.

And this dish was born precisely out of my need to create something that reminded of catering and not home cooking. So in this dish there was all the knowledge acquired in that period, not only of cooking but also of the dedication of other starred chefs.

In particular, in my recipe there was the desire to emulate a great chef of the time Fulvio Pierangelini with his restaurant il Gambero Rosso in San Vincenzo (LI) who made a cream of chickpeas with prawns, clearly not the same as mine.

My chickpea cream remained anchored in tradition with the use of our traditional products, chickpeas, egg pasta and cod. Over time the recipe has been refined and made more delicate, but I propose here the initial version of which I am fond.

Chickpea cream recipe with tagliolini and cod

First we have to soak the cod for 2 or 3 days, then we can move on to the chickpeas that are soaked for one night.

At this point we can think of starting to cook by boiling the chickpeas that should only be salted at the end.

Prepare egg noodles, kneading the eggs with the flour and rolling out the dough.

Now we start the real cooking and take a pan in which we put garlic, oil and chilli pepper and brown the garlic before adding the chickpeas and letting them flavour.

At this point we add hot water and cook for 15 minutes. Then we remove everything from the heat, remove the garlic, blend the chickpeas and put back on the heat adding hot water.

When everything boils again, then we put in the tagliolini.

In the meantime, break up the cod and sauté it in a pan with a little oil.

When the tagliolini are cooked, we serve in the bowl into which we will add the cod.

With this dish I loved drinking Cervaro della Sala, a wine from Grechetto and Chardonnay grapes that is produced in Umbria in the Castello della Sala estate of the Antinori family.