Celeriac Maltagliatta with red pepper and hazelnut sauce_ Iain Graham, Chef and Food stylist

I remember the first time I heard about Maltagliatta, a shape of pasta I learned at 15 many years ago. It means badly cut and what we did back then was a sort or random cut on a finely rolled out fresh pasta dough. It meant you got a lovely folding, slightly random shape to the pasta, it held the sauce beautifully and had an air of mystery when we sent it out as guests were never sure quite what they would receive.

This is my vegan style version of this. Here we thinly slice the celeriac to pasta thickness, blanch it and then toss it into a mix of mushroom dashi and olive oil to give it a rich silky pasta-like feel.

1/2 celeriac, thinly sliced to 1 mm thick slices on a mandolin( the shapes can be cut as randomly or badly as you choose

200 ml Shitake Dashi (25g dried Shitake mushrooms and 400ml water)

50 ml Olive oil or rapeseed oil from a tin or glass bottle.

1 or 2 slices of Sourdough, crust off

3 red peppers cut in half

2 red chilli cut in half and deseeded

1 handful of mixed tomatoes

1 handful of hazelnuts and almonds

3 cloves of garlic

90ml sherry vinegar

2 tsp smoked paprika

30 ml tomato paste

50 green olive pieces finely chopped

Extra olive oil

Bake the tomatoes, peppers, chillies, Sourdough, almonds and hazelnuts and garlic at 180 c for 25 minutes

Remove the skin from the peppers

Pan fry the skinless roasted peppers, almonds, hazelnuts, sourdough, garlic, tomatoes and chillies along with the smoked paprika tomato paste and a good splash of oil.

Cook this down until it becomes thick and sticky.

Blend this to a paste and add olive oil, sherry vinegar and seasoning

Heat 400 ml of water and pour onto 25 g of dried shitake mushrooms, and leave it to steep for around 15 to 20minutes. This should get the deep flavour from the dried mushrooms. Now remove the mushrooms and leave the stock to cool. If you leave the mushrooms in the stock for too long it can begin to take on a slightly bitter flavour.

Boil 1.5 Litres of water with 2 tbs of fine salt

Add the celeriac slices and cook until they have softened, you don’t want them to become mushy.

Mix 50 ml of dashi with 50 ml Olive oil and whisk then together

Drain the celeriac and place into the dashi and season well.

Spoon the pepper sauce onto the base of the plate adding some chopped olive pieces

Add the celeriac pasta and spoon on some more sauce

Finish with a splash of olive oil and a crack of salt. We had some flowering basil in the garden too at the time so sprinkled some of that on too, but not essential, just a nice bonus.