For stage 2 of my wholegrain quest I set myself a double challenge: first, devise a whole-grain pasta dough and from it make ravioli; second: make it seasonal, and make it local (they are, after all, synonymous). This time of year in the Northeast cooking seasonally is certainly a challenge: the farmers at the greenmarkets are reaching into the bottoms of their storage bins and you think you can’t face another dish of root vegetables. But have hope! With a bit of imagination you can make yet another delicious dish without having succumbed to the supermarket’s flown-in-from-Chile asparagus (mmm… asparagus…)

But I digress. I decided that my ravioli would be filled with celery root, because I love its flavor – so bright for a root vegetable. And for my whole grain I would use spelt flour, because I found a bagful of it in my fridge (and what could be more local than that?)  For advice about spelt flour pasta I turned to the King Arthur Whole Grain Baking cookbook, but it was no help: it contains not a single recipe for pasta dough. I looked next in my favorite Italian cookbooks. But there were no hints from Lidia Bastianich, whose white-flour pasta recipe is a favorite of mine; and certainly not from Marcella Hazan, who sternly admonishes that pasta dough must never contain anything except eggs and all-purpose or semolina flour. Surprisingly enough even the internet wasn’t much help: there was nothing at all on Epicurious, and Google returned only a couple of dubious hints that spelt flour in pasta might work.

So there was nothing to do but plunge in headlong. I took my favorite pasta dough recipe, from Lidia Bastianich’s Italian American Kitchen, and substituted, one for one, spelt flour in place of all of the white flour. I stirred in eggs until the dough came together, then turned it onto a floured board and kneaded. And kneaded and kneaded. And kneaded. The dough did start to stiffen, as pasta dough must do, but it never really took on the elasticity and satiny sheen of pasta dough. When I poked the ball of dough with my thumb it stayed poked – the indentation didn’t push itself back out, even after I’d kneaded strenuously for 20 or 25 minutes. When I pulled a pinch of the dough to test its stretchiness, it tore off in my fingers. I foresaw filled pouches of this stuff dropped into a pot of boiling water: it would surely be a huge mess.

Take two. I made a second batch of dough using half spelt flour and half unbleached all-purpose flour. When I kneaded this batch it acted much more like a pasta dough should act. It firmed up. It sheened. It pushed back when I poked it. It developed the sort of skin that tears ever so slightly during kneading. It was pasta dough.

I passed it through the rollers of my pasta machine and clamped circles of it around a simple fillings of pureed celery root (and for good measure a second filling of pureed beet). The finished ravioli needed only a few short minutes in boiling water. It was nutty and hearty. It didn’t have the pillowy lightness of fresh white flour pasta, but made up for with a fortifying whole grain flavor. And they were further improved when, after boiling, I tossed them in a skillet with a bit of melted butter until they became brown and toasty. Healthy and delicious. I tried another batch with the “half white” wheat flour, grown and milled upstate by Cayuga Farms – also delicious, and now truly local.

The real revelation though was the sauce. I found this recipe which featured a chicken broth into which kernels of sweet corn are pureed. Fortunately my freezer is full of delicious summer sweetcorn that I’d put up on August, which worked perfectly for this broth. It was quite delicious but too brothy – it didn’t coat my nutty, skillet-toasted pasta like I wanted. So, in another pan I made a butter-and-flour roux and stirred the broth into it: sweet corn veloute. I finished it with salt, pepper and chopped parsley and was a happy man.

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