Pasta!

Americans know pasta. We eat tons of it every day. Of course, most of that is pretty boring or down right nasty stuff that comes from a box.

I know that my childhood was replete with box after box of Kraft’s Mac and Cheese. Bring your water to a boil, dump in the box of elbows. Cook until “right”. Drain the water, add butter and milk. Then add the powdered cheese.

The American “Alfredo”. Yes, it is as cheap and nasty as it sounds. And American’s seem to love it.

As a cheese wanna-be snob, I order Parmigiano Reggiano DOP every few months. Much better than the powdered stuff in a can.

So why and article on Pasta? Because I like to make my pasta by hand. Well, I call it that, but it wasn’t really “by hand” per the definitions that the real snobs use.

The first “bread machine” method of making pasta is easy. It just costs money.

Like a bread machine, you put your follow the directions, generally just putting the ingredients into the machine, press the start button, and a little while later it starts shoving pasta through the forming die. You slice it to length and you have pasta.

Fast, easy, even a liberal can do it.

The next step up from here is making the dough in a mixing machine, then feeding it through a classic pasta machine.

These machines can be hand powered, or they can have an electric motor. The image is of one with a motor.

These machines allow beginners to succeed. The gist is that you make a dough ball. Cut it into balls of the “right size”. Feed the balls through the rollers, folding it multiple times, until you end up with a long 150 mm wide rectangular piece.

Once it is at that stage, you feed it through the rollers some more, each time moving the rollers closer together.

When it is thin enough, you then feed the now much longer, strip of pasta through the cutters to get the shapes you want. Or you use it as is to make raviolis.

This is how I did it for years. With a hand cranked machine. I have several cutters so we get different pasta shapes as we need or want them.

The nice thing is that you can tell if the dough has not been kneaded enough. If that is the case, you just do more of the fold and squeeze until the dough is right.

The there was last night’s dinner.

My lovely wife made Creamy Chicken Florentine Pasta

It was very, very good.

I got to make the pasta for this.

The machine use was kept to a minimum. That means a Mattarello, a long hardwood rolling pin, 33 inches long and 2 inches in diameter. And the Atlas hand powered pasta machine, but only for cutting the noodles.

My pasta recipe is 1 egg to 3/4 of a cup of flour. Generally, a two egg recipe.

I’m never patent enough so my dough never seems to work out right from the start. I’m just ready and deal.

That means I started with 1.5 cups of all-purpose flour plus two eggs. I wasn’t happy, added another large egg. Too much liquid, refined with another 1/2 cup of flour to finish the kneading process.

Once it was properly kneaded, it was left to rest under the bowl I used to do the mixing. Then the fun began.

I was successful, but only in the sense that I got a working result.

Here is how it is supposed to be done:

My result was not round. It looked more like a bad map of Italy. I wish I had rewatched the video before doing it from memory.

Regardless, I was able to make the dough thin enough that I could cut long rectangles from it. Those were feed through the cutters.

All of it was cooked up. It tasted wonderful. The sauce was flavorful and rich.

The pasta was cooked properly. I was a bit worried because it felt a little thick, but it was fine.

My only feedback, to my wife, was that she needed to cut the chicken into bit sized pieces. The pieces were too large to eat in one bite, but not so large as to require cutting. I ended up just eating the chicken in multiple bites from my fork.

I’m going to be making more pasta during the week. This time I’ll follow the instructions better, and I’ll cut the noddles by hand, instead of with a machine.

If you want to feel hungry, go look up “The Pasta Grannies” on YouTube.