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Recipes with semola rimacinata

8 recipes that use semola rimacinata, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Strascinati con mollica e peperoni cruschi, takes 60 minutes. It is most often cooked with coarse salt, dried yeast and fine salt.

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Focaccia barese

Bari's focaccia is made with boiled potato and durum semolina in the dough, which gives it a tender, almost creamy crumb under a base that fries in olive oil until crisp. It is baked in round iron pans, studded with squashed cherry tomatoes and olives, and sold by the slice at every bakery in the city from mid-morning, warm, folded in paper. On the beach in summer it goes round in squares with a cold drink. This is the Bari version, quite different from a plain herb focaccia or the cheese-filled focaccia of Recco. Chef's tip: be generous with oil in the pan; that layer is what turns the underside golden and crunchy.

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Strascinati con mollica e peperoni cruschi

Strascinati get their name from the way they are made: a piece of semolina dough is dragged (strascinato) across a wooden board under two or three fingers, so it curls into a wide, ridged shell. In the hill towns of Basilicata they are rolled on Sunday mornings and tossed with the simplest dressing of the poor kitchen, olive oil, garlic, breadcrumbs fried until crunchy and crushed peperoni cruschi, the sweet dried peppers of Senise. The crumbs stand in for cheese, which once was a luxury. Chef's tip: fry the breadcrumbs separately and add them at the table, so they are still crackling when you eat.

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Pane di Matera

Matera's bread is a big golden loaf of durum-wheat semolina and sourdough, with a thick crackling crust and a crumb the colour of straw that stays moist for a week. It is shaped into a horned cornetto or a high-backed loaf, and until the 1950s families in the Sassi took their dough to the communal oven, each loaf marked with a carved wooden stamp so it came back to the right house. It is still eaten every day in the city, sliced thickly with olive oil and tomato or soaked in soups. Plan over two days, with a cold rise overnight. Chef's tip: feed your starter with semolina the day before, so its flavour matches the dough.

1440 minItalianBakingVegan
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Fileja al pomodoro piccante

Around Vibo Valentia, on Calabria's Tyrrhenian side, fileja are still rolled by hand around a thin iron rod or knitting needle, which leaves a long, hollow twist that traps sauce inside and out. Nonne make trays of them for Sunday lunch and village sagre, and the classic dressing is a slow tomato sauce sharpened with Calabrian chilli and sweet red onion from nearby Tropea. Many local cooks melt a spoonful of 'nduja into the pan; this version keeps it vegetarian and lets the chilli carry the heat. Chef's tip: dust the needle with semolina, not flour, and twirl with the flat of your palm so each piece slides off cleanly.

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Sfincione

Sfincione is Palermo's own pizza: a tall, airy slab baked in a tray, its soft crumb soaked with a sweet sauce of slow-cooked onions and tomato, dotted with caciocavallo and covered in oregano-scented toasted breadcrumbs. Street sellers cruise the city in three-wheeled vans calling 'sfinciuni!' through loudspeakers, and families bake it at home for Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. The traditional topping includes anchovies; this version leaves them out and keeps all the onion sweetness. Chef's tip: the dough should be wet and bubbly, about 2 cm deep in the tray; it is closer to focaccia than to a thin pizza.

150 minItalianPizza
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Culurgiones

Culurgiones come from Ogliastra, on Sardinia's rugged eastern coast, where women seal each dumpling with a row of tiny pinches that look like an ear of wheat. Inside is a soft, warm filling of potato, aged pecorino, garlic and fresh mint. In villages such as Ulassai and Lanusei they are made for the end of the harvest and for 2 November, All Souls' Day, as a token of good luck and protection. Some families work a little lard into the dough; here it is olive oil. Chef's tip: chill the filling; firm, cold filling is far easier to pleat and won't tear the thin dough.

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Pane carasau

Shepherds in Barbagia, the mountainous heart of Sardinia, took stacks of pane carasau with them for weeks on the high pastures, because this dry, glass-thin flatbread never goes stale. Each disc is baked until it balloons, split in two while hot, then baked again until crisp and golden; Italians call it carta da musica, music paper, for how thin and crackly it is. Sardinians eat it with olive oil and salt as a snack, break it into soups and layer it into pane frattau. Making it at home takes patience and a very hot oven. Chef's tip: split each puffed disc the moment it comes out of the oven; once it cools, the two layers fuse together.

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Seadas

Seadas (or sebadas) are Sardinia's festive dessert: large discs of thin pastry wrapped around fresh, tangy cheese and lemon zest, fried until blistered and golden, then drizzled with warm honey, ideally the bitter strawberry-tree honey of the island's hills. The cheese melts into soft, stretchy strings, so they are a sweet-salty, crisp-gooey surprise. Shepherd families once made them at the end of a festa or for Carnival; today every Sardinian restaurant offers them. The pastry is traditionally made with lard, and here it is butter. Chef's tip: melt the cheese into discs first, so it sets flat and is easy to seal inside the pastry.

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Goes well with semola rimacinata