Chriesi’s newly published pasta recipe with the spotless green pasta, and especially her comment that it was not really troublesome to isolate the chlorophyll, encouraged me to try it. I remember well Robert’s post of 2008 with the instructions, quoted by Chriesi, and I also remember how I admired Robert for his diligence to go through such a procedure just to get green pasta, or “greener” pasta. Anyway, I did it this evening.

To the green tagliatelle, I served new small carrots, from thinning out, fennel, also from the garden, and sweet corn from the shop. The pasta are just with a few flakes of butter, parmigiano shavings, salt and pepper.

This is the chlorophyll paste extracted from 200 g of carrot greens. I followed Robert’s description, only that I did not run the blender until it broke, as he suggested. The blending until it was a soup was the troublesome part, even with the K, adding a bit more water helped a lot.

I ran the soup through a gauze for fiber removal, then heated the juice slowly and filtered the agglomerated chlorophyll through a tea sieve.

Of the carrot greens, I used the upper part with the fine leaves only, and threw the stems away, not because they were not all right, but I didn’t expect too much chlorophyll in them.

The pasta dough consists of 480 g flower plus 4 eggs and 45 g chlorophyll paste. It takes a bit of kneading until the dough is evenly greenish. It may be easier to beat the eggs together with the chlorophyll before adding the mix to the flour.

I used my 35 years old pasta “machine”, made sheets to pos. 4 of 6, then run them through the noodle cutter.

The noodles were excellent, but no different from other times I made them in natural color. Their look, however, was fantastic, really spotless, a smooth uniform green. Preparing the chlorophyll paste is not worth the pain for somebody who enjoys more with the taste buds than with the eye. However, if color combo and taste are asked for: yes, and it’s great fun.

Addendum
For the benefit of the non-German speaking readers, here the procedure for preparing the chlorophyll paste following lamiacucina’s blog, but with my quantities:

Put 200 g edible greens, best with lots of chlorophyll, as spinach or other, finely chopped, together with 750 ml water into the blender and cut until it is soupy, very fine (or until the blender breaks, as Robert suggested). Strain it through a fine sieve or gauze, to separate the liquid from the fiber fraction. Slowly heat the liquid in a large pan, to keep the liquid shallow, and stir carefully, best monitor the temperature with a thermometer. At around 70 to 80 deg C, the chlorophyll starts to agglomerate, above 90 deg C take the pan off the heater, don’t let it boil. Sieve through a fine tea sieve to collect the chlorophyll paste. After build-up of a filter layer by the first particles, the juice leaves almost clear, and the first little filtrate with particles can be recycled into the sieve again.

Background Music

Dire Straits, Love Over Gold, 1982