Fresh Pasta

Let's stretch ourselves a bit this week. Fresh pasta is not quite as simple as making butter. It's not hard to make, but it is the sort of thing that you need to practice a lot. Fresh pasta is not a replacement for the dried pasta you get in the store, because dried pasta has its own culinary applications that are meant to be distinct from fresh pasta in the Italian Kitchen. The Italians are Very Serious about their pasta, and they pair pasta types and shapes with sauces and flavors in a way that is very hard to keep track of if you didn't grow up that way. Which is not to say you can't learn, but to start with it'll be easier to just have a handy reference of which goes with what. My current reference is Mario Batali's Molto Italiano, which is where I'm pulling this recipe. If you can call it a recipe.

You need two things for your basic pasta dough. You need flour, and you need eggs. Three-and-a-half cups of flour, and five eggs. Some of you, especially those who listened to our podcast, are wondering "Why doesn't Brian give his flour measurements in weight instead of volume if weight is so important?" For many recipes, weighing your ingredients is vital. For pasta, it's not really. The podcast listeners will remember the pasta discussion as well, and how the liquid in the eggs is a pretty big variable. You can't really predict how much water will be in five eggs, especially if you do like me and get your eggs from the local CSA, where size variations are not terribly important. Even how old the egg is will vary the amount of water, and the eggs are the only source of water. so you have to balance that with your flour. The only way to perfectly match the amount of flour to the water in the eggs is by feel.

The first thing to do is to make a well out of your flour, and put the eggs into the center of that well. I would love to show you a picture of this, but… er, well creation is sometimes a tricky thing. It involves a certain amount of structural integrity, and sometimes I don't pay enough attention to that. When you're cooking, if the dam breaks and eggs go flying out, a little bit of wrangling is no problem. When you're also the photographer, and you need to get a picture  of a completed well before mixing, that becomes very difficult. The general idea is to take a pile of flour and hollow out the center, spreading it out a bit so the eggs fit in the center of the well. Here's a diagram from the top and side:

Then you take a fork and stir the eggs, hitting the edge of the well enough to free some flour and incorporate it into the eggs. The goal is to mix in enough flour so that it looks less like eggs or even batter as a dough. At some point, it will seem much harder to deal with the mixture with a fork when compared with your hands, and that's when you knead. Keep incorporating while kneading until the dough is no longer sticky, but merely tacky.

See all that extra flour? That was extra after the dough was ready. If you have a pasta machine, keep that, because it'll be useful in a moment. Knead the dough for ten minutes. When you're done, wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let sit for 30 minutes on the counter.

While you're waiting for the gluten to relax in the dough, let's discuss rolling. There are two ways to roll out your pasta. One is with a machine, and the other is with a rolling pin. I am partial to a machine. So partial, in fact, that I have never used a rolling pin. If you are interested in the rolling pin method. Marcella Hazan has great instructions in the Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, which is required reading for lovers of Italian cuisine in any case.

For those who want to use a pasta rolling machine, there's this thing about them: you can't really wash them. Which, from a sanitary perspective, is fine, because they are all stainless steel, which is really hard for bacteria to grow on. But you do get dried bits of dough in them, which you really don't want in your next batch of pasta. So, before you make your batch, take some of that leftover flour and mix it with some water to make a new dough. Just a little bit, enough to make a golf-ball sized hunk of dough in your hand. Knead it until it's not sticky any more, and run it through the machine a few times. This will pull off anything that would get into your dough, and it'll give you a little warm-up for what's to come.

Okay, once the dough has rested for 30 minutes, unwrap it, divide it into four, and wrap three of those back in plastic.

Set your pasta machine to it's widest setting, which is probably 1, and run the pasta through. There's some finesse to this to get everything working properly. I find that you don't want to let the machine do all of the work stretching out the dough, so it helps to keep a good grip on the pasta going into the machine and pull back on it enough to stretch it out some, but not enough to break it. If the machine does all the work, it may tear some of the dough, which will look something like this:

If that happens, just fold it over once or twice and feed it through again. You'll get the hang of it. What you're looking for when you feed the dough through is something more like:

Nice and smooth. After you're done with level one, switch to level two and repeat. Try to keep the dough from bunching up at the top, or it'll tear just like it did on level one. Keep going throughout the levels until you're at your desired thickness, which is usually 7 or 8, depending. If you're not very practiced, and you don't have any help, you may find that after level 5 or 6 that the dough is too long to conveniently work with. If that's the case, stop for a moment and cut the dough in half so you have two stubbier strips instead of one really long one.

Finish one, then finish the other. Once you've gotten to this point, you have many options of how to proceed. You could use these almost just like they are (but shorter) for lasagna. Or you could hand cut them to a number of shapes. You could use them for ravioli or a number of stuffed pastas. Or you can put in your cutting attachment and make fettuccine or similar. If you're going the last route, I recommend, lightly dusting both sides of the pasta with flour before running them through the cutter. The cutting process is exactly the same as the rolling process, except you only do it once. Feed the narrower end first, if you have a narrower end, and try to run it through as straight as possible. You'll notice that if you go in at an angle or you move side to side, the strips will be cut off short. Not a big deal, but harder to deal with.

You need to let you pasta dry a bit. The method I was taught in Italy was to cover the pasta pretty thoroughly with flour and curl up in a nest.

This is good if you get enough flour on it to keep it from sticking together and you cook it shortly thereafter. If you want to dry the pasta, then you'll want to hang it up. I used to have a complicated contraption with dowels that could collapse or expand to dry out pasta, but that took up too much space when I wasn't using it. Next time I make pasta, I have a clever plan for using those 3M Command hooks and some butcher's string. I'll write up something at The Food Geek once it's tested out.

For those of you who make pasta, what are your recommendations for well creation, drying, and anything else that you think might be useful. Pasta making really does benefit from experience, both yours and others. If you can find someone who makes their own pasta, I highly recommend asking them to show you at least once, and be sure to feel the pasta dough at each stage, so you'll understand what it's supposed to be like. You'll get the experience eventually on your own, but it's really nice to know what you're aiming for.

Comments

[Kathy Kildea]

Haven't made pasta in .... ummmm... Way too long! Thinking that maybe this will be the topic for 'teach your neighbor to cook' blog. So much fun, and the result is heavenly! oooohhhh, and fresh tomatoes and basil, as well. ok, it's now a MUST do this weekend.

[Brian]

Kathy,

Pasta is a perfect thing for Teach Your Neighbor to Cook week. I hope you can inspire someone else to make their own pasta. I know I'll be making more soon, and hopefully regularly.