Approximately two years ago, my sister and I attempted to make Mario Batali's basic pasta dough from his cookbook Molto Italiano. It was an egg-based dough, and it unfortunately didn't work out for us. We had a hard time rolling the dough out, and it dried out on us so that we really had to cook it a lot longer than we did in reality. We didn't realize this, though, and it ended up being chewy, unpleasant, and undercooked.
Luckily for us, we've learned a lot more about cooking since then, and I had the confidence to tackle making pasta dough again today, this time somewhat successfully (with a few tiny, but not disastrous, flaws). This time I chose to make a eggless pasta dough from the Italian Food Forever website, mostly because it gives instructions for rolling the dough out by hand rather than with a pasta machine (which I don't have), but also because the ingredient list is so basic with just flour, salt, and water, and no eggs.
I began this dough by mixing the flour, salt, and water on the counter top until it could form a ball. The recipe itself doesn't give exact amounts, but I ended up using two cups of flour per batch (I made three batches), a pinch of salt, and for the water, I just gradually added it to the flour until it could form a ball.
Once the balls of dough were formed, I wrapped them in plastic wrap and let them rest for a few hours. This way they didn't dry out during the resting time, but the gluten relaxed enough that it was easy to roll the dough out when the time came. The recipe specifies you only need to let the dough rest for 20 minutes, but I wanted to make the dough ahead of time so that I wouldn't have so much to do around dinner time. It really didn't hurt the dough to let it sit longer.
Probably the biggest challenge, and one that wasn't easy for me to recognize until the pasta was cooked, was just how difficult it's to roll the dough out to a desirable thinness. Having not kept in mind that pasta expands when it's boiled, I didn't roll the noodles out thin enough, so I found my noodles were a bit thick once they were cooked. Next time I need to roll the dough out more thinly.
When the dough was rolled, I cut it into noodles with a sharp knife. I decided to cut the dough into tagliatelle, but I think they might have been thicker than that in the end. It was all cut very roughly, which I suppose is part of the charm of homemade pasta. Why make homemade pasta if it's going to look exactly like what you can get at the grocery store?
Jennifer and I decided that we'd pair the noodles with a lemony sauce, a recipe from the Mario Batali cookbook we own, Molto Italiano. It happens to be one of our favorites at the moment, so Jennifer worked on that while I was cutting the pasta dough in to shapes. It just includes lemon zest and juice, red onion, butter, parmesan cheese, red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper. It's very simple, but something different from your regular tomato sauce.
Overall, I was happy with the end result. The noodles tasted nice with the lemony sauce we had for them. I found them to be really starchy, however, so although I don't usually rinse pasta, I probably would with these noodles. I think we may have overcooked them slightly too. Generally, though, I'm surprised at how little time it really takes to make your own noodles. It took me a lot less time than I ever thought it would. I think I'm confident enough to give other pasta dough recipes a try now.
No comments:
Post a Comment