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If you thought these were beans at first glance, I don’t blame you! But they aren’t, they are a vibrant green pasta called Pici pasta and gets it’s mesmerizingly bright colour from spinach. They’re so easy to make, don’t require any fancy equipment like a pasta roller and they’re so fun to eat as well.
Spinach – All you need is regular old baby spinach for this recipe. I haven’t personally tried it but you could use frozen spinach instead if you can’t get your hands on fresh.
Flour – Just ordinary all purpose flour is perfect for pici pasta. There’s no need for extra fine or bread flour, though if you have them, they’ll work fine too.
Salt – Even though you salt the pasta water, I always add a pinch of salt to my pasta dough as well. Of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I prefer it.
STEP 1
Add all of your ingredients to a food processor and blend for a couple of minutes until it forms a vibrant green and smooth dough. You might need to stop it half way and scrape the sides down but just trust the process. If your dough is a little too dry or wet, read below under Troubleshooting for how to fix it.
STEP 2
Transfer your dough to a bench and pinch off a small amount (about a tsp worth). With your hands, roll it into a long skinny shape that somewhat resembles a snake bean. Another great thing about pici pasta is that the size and shape really doesn’t matter so don’t worry at all if you can’t get them perfect… Trust me, mine weren’t in the slightest.
STEP 3
Drop you pici pasta into a pot of salted boiling water and boil for about 30 seconds to a minute or until they float to the surface.
STEP 4
You can top them with whatever sauce you like but I just tossed mine through some garlic butter because I didn’t want to hide the pasta.
Any leftovers can be stored in the fridge in an airtight container for a couple of days. I wouldn’t recommend freezing it though as pasta really doesn’t taste nice once it’s been frozen.
Yes you certainly can! You have two options here, you can either pre-prepare the dough and set it in the fridge for up to a day then roll it out when you’re ready. Or you can make and roll the dough and set it aside either on a pasta rack or on a tray lined with baking paper and sprinkled with flour for extra non-stickness. If you opt for laying them on a tray, make sure they are in a single layer, otherwise they will stick together and all the hard work you put into rolling them will be for nothing.
If you dry the pasta, you can really leave them for as long as you need (up to a week) because they’ll just become dried pasta. When you’re ready to cook them, do exactly the same as you would if they were fresh, but just cook them for a little bit longer until they are al dente. The cooking time will depend completely on how dry and thick they are, so you’ll have to use intuition on this one.
The thing with natural products like spinach is that some batches (not sure what to call a collective bunch of spinach) might contain more or less water than another. For that reason, your dough might need a little bit more water to bring it together. If it is a little bit dry and doesn’t form a squishy dough when you pinch it together, just add about a tbsp of water and blend again. If it’s still too crumbly, add another splash and repeat until it’s done.
If it’s too wet, do the opposite and add another tbsp of flour. Just don’t panic, it’ll be fine! 🙂
If your food processor isn’t very powerful, you might find that it doesn’t break down the spinach enough to get any liquid out of it and form a dough with the flour. If that’s the case and you know your blender isn’t very strong, try blitzing your spinach with a tbsp of water first until you get a bright green liquid then add the flour and continue the recipe as usual.
Mon Mack Food is my little space to share my passion for food. It is also a place to document the recipes I’ve created while cooking for friends and family! While it is now just a hobby, my absolute dream is to build this project into something I can one day call my job 🙂
