This unusual, homemade buckwheat pasta is called blecs, and it’s from Fruili, in northern Italy. The dough is a mix of wheat and buckwheat flour, and it’s served with a simple sauce of chicken or other white meat, onions and herbs.

The reason why buckwheat pasta is a thing in the Alps is because up there, wheat is expensive — but buckwheat grows well in the mountains. So blecs were a way to extend the family’s supply of wheat.

These days wheat is relatively cheap, so you make buckwheat pasta for the flavor and color, not necessarily to save money. The flavor really is best described as earthy: you get a whole-grain, hippie-food vibe with blecs that I love. I like the color and texture even better. Rustic. Speckled like a pretty bean. Slightly rough, like stone-ground wheat. Hearty.

Making Buckwheat Pasta

Buckwheat pasta dough is sturdy and fairly dry, so two pieces of equipment make things easier: a pasta machine and a vacuum sealer.

You don’t have to have these, but the pasta machine — I use an old, manual Atlas pasta maker — helps you laminate the dough (more on this below) and roll it out to the proper thickness. The vacuum sealer will hydrate your dough instantly and, I find, more completely than does wrapping it in plastic.

That said, you can make the buckwheat dough and keep it in a plastic bag for 1 hour to hydrate, and you can use a rolling pin to make the sheets of dough. After all, this is how blecs were made for centuries.

One other nice thing to have would be a fluted pasta cutter, which is super cheap and makes pretty scalloped edges. Again, not strictly needed, but nice.

Making the blecs is pretty simple. You mix wheat flour, buckwheat flour, a touch of olive oil, and some eggs to make a stiff dough. You then let the buckwheat pasta hydrate — you cannot skip this step because the dough will be crumbly otherwise.

Roll the dough into sheets, cut those sheets in about 2-inch-long strips, cut those strips into squares, slice those squares in half on the diagonal to make triangles.

The Pasta Sauce

This sauce is from the awesome cookbook Friuli Food and Wine, which I highly recommend if you want to cook alpine Italian food. But you can serve buckwheat pasta with a simple bath of browned butter and sage, and some grated pecorino cheese would be amazing.

My smoked salmon pasta recipe, using any smoked fish — trout would be very alpine — would also be perfect for buckwheat pasta. Another good option would be my mushroom ragu.

The sauce in the picture is rich, deep and perfect for a cold, or at least cool, day. It’s traditionally chicken (I used pheasant), browned onions, sage, a handful of dried mushrooms, and a little beer or white wine. It’s brown on brown, though, so I added parsley.

You could very easily add other greens to this, like black kale, chard or turnip greens. Or more mushrooms. But keep it fairly simple because the beauty of it is that simplicity, plus the heavy browning of the ingredients.

Serving and Storing

Once made, buckwheat pasta will keep a long time: because it’s a dry dough to begin with, it dries hard in just a day or two if left out at room temperature. I keep it in a plastic bag with one of those dessicant packets, and it’s fine for weeks.

The sauce will keep in the fridge for a week or so, and is excellent reheated.

If you liked this recipe, please leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating and a comment below; I’d love to hear how everything went. If you’re on Instagram, share a picture and tag me at huntgathercook.