bagels & lox, but make it pasta
easy pasta "patches" with hot-smoked salmon, crème fraîche & seeded breadcrumbs
Bagels and lox run in my blood. Unsurprising, considering I come from a long line of New York Jews, some of whom first landed at Ellis Island nearly 150 years ago. Still, even within the context of a lox-loving family, my devotion to cured and smoked salmon has always bordered on obsessive, so much so that my grandmother crowned me the “lox box” at the esteemed age of four. Lox would appear on the breakfast table, a vast spread (supposedly) serving at least ten, and then, like magic, it would disappear, leaving only a faint pool of pinkish oil behind. I have since learned that such lox-eating habits must be curbed—at least until I win the lottery—yet it remains, even now, one of my favorite things to eat.
When I started hosting supper club dinners in Brooklyn, back in 2019, one of the first dishes I created was a bagel and lox-inspired cappelletti, technically “little hats” but ones that could, in my mind, be easily mistaken for mini bagels. The dough was made with rye flour; the pasta was stuffed with farmer cheese (like ricotta, but from Eastern Europe), capers, and ground caraway; the plate was finished with lemon butter, pickled onions, various bagel-adorning seeds, and fat pearls of smoked trout roe. It looked fancy, but it tasted familiar, and became an easy favorite on the menu.
Smoked salmon might not ring Italian, but it’s become increasingly popular throughout the country. It is not, however, the classic bagel or bread accompaniment as it is in the States; instead, cold-smoked salmon is usually served alone, as an antipasto (carpaccio, tartare), or in involtini (roll-ups), salads, and tarts. But perhaps its most popular application is in pasta, and particularly alongside butter and cream. Dried pasta is usually the vehicle for such an indulgent dish, but for today’s recipe I decided to continue my track record of serving it with something fresh and, better yet, something new.
Even a lifetime would not be long enough to come across every pasta shape on this earth, a glorious fact that has kept me on my toes for the last many years. Today I’m sharing a shape I had heard of once or twice but had yet to make: blecs, pasta “patches” from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, near Austria and Slovenia. Blecs are, essentially, a version of maltagliati—a more popular, more Italian name meaning “badly cut,” referring to a mishmash of pasta scraps (the full meaning of “blec” is, indeed, a “piece of cloth for patching; odd cutting,” from the Slovenian bleck and German vleck). But blecs have their own personality, too: Instead of accidental leftovers, they’re purposefully made with a unique combination of buckwheat, wheat, and sometimes corn flours, eggs, water, and, often, a touch of butter. The pasta sheets aren’t sliced randomly, either, instead cut into even triangles, and served delicately with butter and a dusting of cheese.
At first I chose blecs because I happen to flip to their entry in my trusty Encyclopedia of Pasta and wanted to try them. But they quickly started to remind me of toast points, and toast points then reminded me of smoked salmon. So here we are: A reimagined, slightly simpler-but-no-less-delicious version of my bagel and lox cappelletti, and exactly the brunchy food I want to be eating on a long weekend at the end of May. In typical rogue form, I swapped the traditional buckwheat flour for rye, the cold- for hot-smoked salmon, the heavy cream for lighter crème fraîche. Perhaps my favorite part, though, is the torrent of crunchy homemade breadcrumbs studded with seeds—sesame, poppy, caraway—that brings it all together and reminds me of those mornings with my grandma, sneaking strips of lox under the table while she pretended not to notice.
PS: Before I go, check out these other Memorial Day Weekend-ready recipes:
Pasta Patches (Blecs) with Hot-Smoked Salmon, Crème Fraîche & Seeded Breadcrumbs
Serves 4 to 6