Cooking School: Croatian "Trganci" pasta
Make and cook in around the same time it takes to boil dried pasta
The Capsule Pantry in one sentence: Save money, time, and food waste by adopting a Capsule Pantry approach — a small number of ingredients that form the basis of thousands of different, highly flexible recipes.
Since discovering the wonders of Trganci, I’ve not bought dried pasta since.
Pronounced turr-gan-si, trganci pasta is one of those things that makes you scream HOW IS IT SO SIMPLE YET SO DELICIOUS?! It’s also very forgiving to make and cook. You don’t need to roll it out super thin or use a pasta machine, which makes it quicker and easier than 99% of fresh Italian pasta.
Trganci takes something like 7 minutes to make and 2-3 minutes to boil. Plus, a bag of decent flour costs less than a packet of fancy dried or fresh pasta, so it’s cheap to boot.
125g - 200g strong white flour per 2 people, depending on how much you eat
Warm water. The amount of water should be 58-60% of the flour weight. 125g of flour would need 75ml water. 200g of flour would need 120ml water.
A dash of olive oil (around 1-1.5 tsp)
A pinch of sea salt
Put the flour and salt into a bowl.
Pour in the water and oil and mix to form a dough. Knead until soft and pliable. You don’t have to knead for long, around 2-5 minutes is fine.
You can do one of two things here. The first is to make all the Trganci on a work surface. The other is to drop them straight into a pan of boiling water.
If you choose the former, flour your work surface. Grab around half the dough and flatten it out into a thick circle on your hands. Tear off little pieces of dough, flatten them slightly, and place them onto the floured surface. Once they’re ready, drop them into a pan of salted boiling water.
If you choose the latter, do the same but drop the Trganci straight into the water. You need to work quick here, I find it best to rope in a friend. This is a good method to use once you’re used to tearing off the Trganci from the main ball.
Boil for 2-3 minutes until the pasta still has a chew but is no longer raw. Drain, reserving some of that starchy pasta water to add to your sauce if it needs it. Mix in your sauce of choice.
Strong white bread flour is best for Trganci but you can also make it with plain flour if you don’t have bread flour to hand.
The dough is best on the drier side so it doesn’t stretch too much when you’re tearing off your Trganci.
This pasta is super forgiving so don’t worry if you over or under boil it. It’ll still be delicious.