What is the good flour? How to use? Last night, on MasterChef, the contestants, in the Golden Mystery Boxthey found an assortment of yellow-colored ingredients: in addition to cheddar cheese, chanterelles, mustard, yellow apple, turmeric, passion fruit and petit pâtisson (or patissone courgette), there was also good flour. Since it is still little knownHowever, the aspiring chefs competing didn’t know exactly how to use it.
What is good flour?
In fact, good flour – a traditional product of the Onsernone Valley, one of the most inaccessible in the Canton of Ticino, a few kilometers from Locarno – remained forgotten for a few decades. Until Ilario Garbani Marcantini, primary school teacher in Intragnatogether with the Onsernonese Museum, has rediscovered and valorised this precious corn flour, which is obtained grinding the toasted grain very finely.
His own story
It is said that the first to produce it was a miller from Vergeletto called Annunziata Terribilinicalled Nunzia, who did with corn (the same that is used for the production of polenta, coming from the Magadino plain) what was traditionally done with rye: a nice roasting in a pan until the beans burst, which he then ground finely to obtain a flour with a unique flavour. Good flour is also characterized by the type of grinding, very fine, thanks to the use of special, smooth millstones, like those of the now ruined mills of Vergeletto.
Once upon a time, farina bòna was part of the diet of the Onsernonesi, who consumed it accompanied with milk, cold or hot, water or wine, or in the form of soup, la poltina. But the change in eating habits after the Second World War progressively reduced the presence of this ingredient. At the end of the 1960s, even the last Onserno miller left his job, and good flour was no longer talked about for a long time. Only in 1991 and 2013 were the Loco and Vergeletto mills restarted and they started grinding it again.
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