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Chef Tommy Baldassarri and Luisa Pollio’s secret recipe is mixing Italian tradition with modern innovation in their gluten-free pasta dishes.
Gnocchi with cream, sausage and mushrooms.
When Warkworth’s Luisa Pollio found out she was gluten intolerant, her partner chef Tommy Baldassari put his culinary mind to the seemingly impossible task of making gluten-free pasta.
“I’m Italian. I can’t live without pasta, so I started looking at recipes and playing with different flours,” Tommy says.
After a year of experimentation, and a lot of food in the bin, Tommy found the perfect blend of flours, including rice, tapioca, potato, buckwheat, millet, corn and amaranth – the namesake of their mobile restaurant, Amaranto.
The recipe also includes some closely guarded secret ingredients to give the pasta elasticity without gluten.
Tommy held extensive taste testing sessions with Italian friends to ensure he had a product that was as good as the real thing.
Having started operating their Amaranto food truck in mid-2018, Tommy and Luisa already have 1300 followers on Facebook, who keep an eye out for when the truck might visit their area.
“We have customers with coeliac gluten intolerance come back to us and say they had never eaten ravioli or fettucine before, and they think it is amazing.”
As well as favourites like arancini balls, ricotta ravioli and spaghetti bolognese, Tommy’s menu includes a dish from his home region of Marche in Italy called strozzapreti.
“My grandmother told me it means ‘choke the priest’ because when the region was part of the Vatican, priests would come to the door to collect taxes and people would invite them in for pasta. The taste of strozzapreti is so good that the priests would choke from eating it so fast.”
Strozzapreti is hand rolled short strips of pasta. There is no egg in the recipe and therefore allows Amaranto to offer a vegan meal option.
In Italy, Tommy was working 80 hours a week as a chef, so he and Luisa decided to move to New Zealand for a better life.
Tommy worked for Totos in Nelson Street, Farina in Ponsonby and Plume in Matakana before he and Luisa decided to create their own mobile restaurant.
They found a 1966 caravan a few doors down the road from their home in Warkworth and spent 10 months painstakingly converting it into a commercial kitchen.
The Amaranto truck serves fresh Italian pasta most Friday nights next to River Nile Linen, in Matakana, and most Sunday nights next to the Leigh Central Motel.
The couple also cater for events and say that the trend of food truck weddings seems to be catching on.
“It’s a more relaxed format that allows guests to eat when they want and move around and talk to people. It’s more like an Italian fiesta.”
This summer they will be at several markets in Auckland, as well as the Matakana moveable feast nights between January and March, and at the new 8 Wired brewery in Matakana from November 7 to 10.
