I haven’t posted in a long while, because I’ve been working on complex (for me) new food project researching and then proofing a sourdough culture. It is finally proofed and now sitting dormant in the refrigerator. (My brilliant husband created a proofing box that uses a fishtank heater.) The culture is an Italian culture recommended for pizza dough. The culture has a different strain of yeast than commercial yeast. The culture is dormant when refrigerated, and I will be reactivating it (or attempting to) in a few weeks when I have a free weekend, for my first try at a wet-style pizza dough.
The term “sourdough culture” is a little misleading. This is not a culture that will make the pizza dough taste like sourdough bread. This is the type of culture that was first used to make pizza, so it is the more traditional Napoletean way to make pizza. I’m sure it will be a big learning curve, so I can’t promise when I’ll post a successful dough recipe. But hopefully it won’t be too long!
But I digress … in the meantime, now that my proofing project is over, I’m back to cooking lots of new recipes. This recipe for homemade pasta is time-intensive but easy. All you need is a hand-crank pasta roller, which you can get for about $30 dollars at a kitchen store such as Bed, Bath and Beyond. After convincing Sam it was worth the investment, because it would pay off for him in the form of homemade pasta, I indulged in the pasta-maker attachments to my KitchenAid mixer. It is a wonderful luxury! This recipe will make enough pasta for 2 hungry people. Homemade pasta is so lovely when you have the time to make it.
Ingredients
- 3 large eggs
- 2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 tbsp. water + additional water as needed
- 1 tbsp. olive oil
- 1/2 tsp. kosher salt
In a small bowl, beat the eggs, water, oil and salt. (Do not use cold eggs, warm them up to room temperature.) Add the flour to your food processor. Turn on the food processor and slowly add the egg mixture into the flour, until it forms a ball. If it doesn’t form a ball with this amount of liquid, then begin adding more water. Add about 1 tsp. of water at a time until it forms a ball. The humidity of the air plays a factor, so it’s not easy to say the exact amount of water you will need.
When it forms a ball, place it on a lightly floured surface, then knead the dough for about two minutes. To knead the dough, use the heel of your hand and push the dough away from you. (You have the most force and control this way.) Then turn the dough 1/4 turn and repeat. Wrap the dough with plastic wrap and let it rest for about 30 minutes.
To roll the dough, cut it into six pieces and shape each pieces into a disk. (Wrap the pieces you are not working with in plastic wrap or they will get an undesirable dry crust!) Feed the dough through the pasta maker according to the settings of your pasta maker. You start with the widest setting and keep going. When the dough starts to get really long, you can cut the piece in half and keep going. The hardest part about making dough is to keep it from sticking together as it dries. If the pasta dough sticks to itself, it’s not going to unstick and will be a big old mess. Get several wooden cutting boards and sprinkle them generously with semolina flour. What I do is roll as many pasta sheets as I can, then lay them on the wooden cutting boards. I also line cookie sheets with parchment paper, sprinkle them with semolina flour, and lay pasta sheets on them.
Pasta sheets drying on parchment-paper-lined cookie sheets. Semolina flour is sprinkled over the parchment paper so the sheets don't stick.
Once I have no more room for the pasta sheets, I cut the sheets into pasta strands. This involves a different pasta fitting for the KitchenAid, of course. I like to make linguine, because frankly it’s easier to manage. The trick here is to gently feed it in with one hand, as you gently grab the pasta strands coming out the other side. Once a sheet is cut into strands, you can either hang the strands on a pasta rack or place them in nests on a parchment-paper-linked cookie sheet, sprinkling them with a LOT (a lot) of semolina flour so they don’t stick together. I do nests. As an alternative, get large pots and hang each strand over the edge of the pot (but this seems really difficult to me), making sure they don’t stick together or they will get stuck. Once all your sheets are cut, then keep going until you’ve rolled and cut all the dough.
To cook the pasta, place it in boiling water that is very well-salted (like ocean salt, using kosher salt) for about 3 minutes. Taste it to make sure it’s done. If it’s not, it will still have a chewy feel and a raw-dough taste. If it is cooked, you will know because it tastes good! Don’t cook it too long or it will become mushy. Do not rinse the pasta after it cooks, and do not add oil to your water. The oil will inhibit sauce from sticking to the pasta. For many recipes, you want to save the pasta water and add it to your sauce, so depending on what you’re making, don’t throw out all this wonderful liquid!
Homemade pasta with homemade pesto sauce. (Pesto recipe coming soon.)
