Homemade Pasta: The Reckoning

It's been a while, but I finally gave up. With a library at hand, I checked out a book on making pasta and followed some directions. I know, I know, not the usual. Whatever, I wanted something that tasted good, and I wanted it quickly. The short version of my short cutting? Success! And sweat.

Turns out I've been doing many things wrong. One: equal parts egg and flour is a little too dry. Two: half semolina flour is still too rough. Three: all-egg for liquid is a little firm. Four: kneading for a few minutes isn't enough. Five: rolling for a few minutes isn't enough. Six: cutting my noodles all wrong. I wonder how many experiments it would have taken to figure that out? I had already given up on more iterations of homemade pasta as it has been horrible every time. Except now, of course. Cookbooks: pretty rad, actually.

We topped it with a homemade white-wine sauce, made up on the spot. I provide a recipe, but you should understand this as simply what I made, not how one makes sauce. I, honestly, have no clue but guessed together something good. I used home-grown sage - E has started a wonderful garden on the deck. While we eagerly await the first greens from it, I have been using the sage as often as E will let me. I would surely kill the plant without her intervention - we have this great recipe, invented by E and cooked by me, that I'll share some time. It uses a bit of sage.

The pasta was also topped with crispy slices of leek; I'll omit a recipe for that but you can figure it out. It involves a cast iron, salt, and a bit of oil. And about ten minutes of your time.

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Homemade Pasta in White Wine Sauce

Serves.. 3? Whatever

Takes a really long time

Pasta

1 large egg (60g or so)

50g white flour

25g whole-wheat flour

25g semolina flour

2tbsp water, give or take

Mix the flours together in a small bowl. Stir in the egg and water using a fork; the dough should be dry-ish, but smooth on the surface. On a very lightly floured large work surface, begin kneading the dough. Add flour as necessary, but keep to a minimum. Around five minutes, test the dough by gently pulling it - if it rips immediately, wet your hands and work it into the dough. If you get a little stretch, then a rip, maybe add a drop of water. Otherwise, just keep kneading for another five minutes. If it ever begins sticking, add a bit more flour. If it appears dry, add a few drops of water. The surface of the dough will be smooth and it should be pliable and stretchy. Cover and let rest for 30 minutes. You can start the sauce now if you want.

After 30 minutes, prepare your muscles and a large work surface, very lightly dusted in flour. We have a rather large cutting board - at least 24"x18", if not larger - and cut our dough in half before rolling. The little lump of dough will need a rather lot of space. Using your hands, make the dough into something like a rectangle. Then start rolling. Keep rolling, rotating the dough and dusting with hints of flour if it sticks. Use your forearms. E rolled for maybe ten minutes; I took around five. If you are lacking in upper-body strength, I suggest making friends with a climber (great for opening cans - many more uses around the house as well).

The dough is thin enough when you can see through it. Yeah, it is a lot of work. And it is possible by hand. If you cut the dough in two, put the first finished piece between two towels so it doesn't form a crust while you finish the second piece. To cut the pasta into long, straight noodles, use the following magic trick: place the dough flat and roll up the top and bottom edges until they meet in the center. Fold in half. Cut. Magic! Unroll all the noodles and cook in a large pot of salted, boiling water for three minutes. Drain and serve immediately (or, drain, toss in sauce, and serve immediately).

Sauce

1/2 cup white wine of some sort (I don't pretend to know)

1/2 cup water (could probably replace this with more wine or stock of sorts)

1tsp butter

1 italian onion, diced

handful cherry tomatoes, cut in half

can of white beans + liquid

several fresh sage leaves, coarsely chopped

(optionally) a bit of leftover, cooked, thick-cut bacon from a previous meal

In a large sauce pan, heat a splash of oil over medium. Add the diced onion, a bit of salt, and let cook for a while. Stir it every now and then, adding oil as necessary, until it has softened. Add the wine, water, some salt+pepper, whatever dry spices you want, and the bacon if you have it. Reduce to low and let simmer until much of the liquid is gone, tasting and seasoning as you go. Remove the bacon, dice it up, and put aside for crisping and future garnish.

If it is more than give minutes before your past will be ready, shut off the heat. Otherwise, cut the tomatoes in half and add them, along with the entire can of beans+liquid and the sage. Increase heat to medium and stir everything together for five minutes. Toss with noodles and serve immediately, topped with bacon and crisped leek rounds.

Spaghetti-Sauce Sandos

Cooking more meals at home also means having more leftovers. Never is this more apparent than in the preparation of pasta. Portioning noodles is easy - boil as many as you want. The rest will keep as they are dry. Pasta sauce, not so much. It comes in these giant jars, fit for a family. Solution: put it on a sandwich. Try and make it less messy than pictured below if you want to proudly post photos of it, mind you:

That is a fresh-baked "ciabatta" roll with reheated spaghetti sauce, spinach wilted in, and a fried egg. It is Grade A delicious. I suggest you make it some time. You'll also notice the patterning on the bread. I finally caved and began proofing my freestanding loaves in an improvised banneton - a bowl lined with a floured cloth. I'm not sure if it helps the proofing process, but the visual appeal is worth the effort expended in washing the cloth afterwards.

On that note, most of my cooking effort (as opposed to normal dinners, which are not usually worth a recipe post) has been invested in bread. Hence the lack of recipes, and instead an influx of beautiful breads. All three breads pictured in this post, in fact, used the exact same recipe. They were all mixed the same, bulk-risen the same, and cooked (roughly) the same. Only the shaping and proofing differed. Though, really, the cooking is the key. Dutch oven, or equivalent, all the way. Cover your bread for the first half of the oven time and cook it hot. By cooking the bread covered, you prevent a crust from forming until much later in the baking process, at which point more of the bread is ready to crust up.

Homemade Noodles, Take Two

I took a Thursday and Friday off last week and did, roughly, nothing with them. I played some video games  sketched at coffee shops, read a bit, and coded for fun. But, really, I didn't do anything. Not even any culinary adventures with my free time. The closest I got was iterating on handmade pasta. Learning from the previous time, a flour mixture of 50% semolina and 50% white flour was used. The pasta was also rolled for much longer - though sans machinery there is a limit to how thin I can manage. And then the cutting. Lots of cutting.

But it was good - much lot closer to pasta than the doughy previous attempt. The noodles maintained a little bit of the gummy-ness of the previous attempt, but it was rolled and cut thin enough to cook as pasta and not as boiled bread. When topped with a sauce made by E, it was a fantastic dinner.

A project that has just been started is some test baking for a local baker. The first loaf came out rather well as you can see in the photo. It was a very simple loaf, made without a preferment, but with lots of cold fermentation time and a wonderful crust. After cooling, the crust had softened a bit, but everything else was wonderful. Which is something of a shame, as the new coffee shop/toast bar has started serving up toast in addition to the awesome espresso and drip. So I can now, no matter my laziness level, go get a piece of thick-cut toast for breakfast without making it myself.

Figs and Bacon

The farmer's market at the Ferry Building in SF is an oddity; both a large tourist draw as well as a favorite of locals. Unlike the Powell-Hyde/Powell-Mason cable car lines, Fisherman's Wharf, and Alcatraz, the number of tourists at the market Saturday morning is likely less than locals. In addition to finding the rare and elusive mingling of tourists and locals (see also "Dolores Park" and "Alamo Square"), one can usually find meal inspiration. Sitting on a bench with E, drinking morning inspiration, she mentioned making pasta dough was really easy and we decided to add it to the "cook sometime" list. Otherwise, our goal was some fruit with which to make sorbet and something for dinner.

We rambled through the market, looking for tasty things. My wonderful discovery last week of tiny brussels was not to be repeated, though E spied some lavender to pretty up my place with. We also impulse-purchased some figs; I thought on a whim, but E had something in mind for them. Having completed a loop, we decided the lavender would go great with blueberry so off I went to get a basket. I also asked the mushroom man for some recommendations as I've been attempting to convince my taste buds of them; he suggested a variety I can't remember the name of for a pasta primavera. A meal had formed - pasta primavera with homemade noodles.

Now, as is often the case, I was mistaken on the matter of a pasta primavera. E suggested we add carrots and peas; I replied that, no, the dish was just deconstructed mushroom sauce. It wasn't until this morning, several days after devouring the meal, I discovered my error. According to the great settler of debates, Wikipedia most decidedly decided in E's favor - carrots and peas are in. Oh well, oh well. It was still good, though not the star of the meal. That would be these figs:

Warmed figs, with bacon, garlic, rosemary, and lavender topped with the smallest amount of goat cheese. This is based on a recipe from The Herbal Kitchen that E had been eyeing for quite some time and even, apparently, planned for the figs from the get-go. An aside on this book: I have yet to make anything less than excellent from it; these are simple, restaurant-worthy dishes in home kitchen-worthy preps. The figs, though, the figs! I would gladly eat these again, then have even more of them after. Most of the prep can be done an hour or more in advance of eating them, at which point they need only five minutes in a warmed oven, making them perfect for lightening a cooking load.

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Warm Figs With Bacon and Goat Cheese

Makes enough for 2 people to devour, but scales well

3 ripe figs

2 pieces bacon

1-2 cloves garlic, minced

rosemary (fresh is better)

lavender (fresh is better)

goat cheese

Preheat oven to 350. Cook bacon in a pan, rendering the fat out and crisping it. When the bacon is crisped, remove and pat dry. Pour of some, but not all, of the bacon grease - keep roughly a tablespoon or so, enough to lightly coat the pan. Add the minced garlic and herbs to the pan, cooking for a few minutes until the garlic is slightly browned; remove from heat. Dice the garlic into small pieces, eating some, then add back to the pan with garlic and mix. Slice each fig in half and, using a spoon or thumb, create a depression in the center of each. Spoon some of the mixture into each of the figs. Five minutes before you want to eat them, add a tiny dollop of goat cheese to each and place in oven for five minutes. Eat immediately.

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Homemade Pasta

Serves 2

1 egg

twice as much semolina flour as egg, by weight

tsp olive oil

pinch salt

First, a note: don't use 100% semolina flour, as we did. 50/50 semolina/all-purpose is probably better. In a small bowl, mix the salt and flour together. Form a divot in the middle. Break the egg yolk with your finger, mix it around a little, then put it in the divot with the tsp olive oil. Mix, lightly, by hand to incorporate the ingredients. It should form a nice dough. Knead, flouring as necessary, for 10 minutes. Place in a bowl and cover to let the gluten rest for 30 minutes.

Prepare a pot of water to boil, with a little salt. Lightly dust a work surface in semolina flour and pull out the rolling pin. Roll the pasta into a thin sheet. No, thinner than that. As thin as you can manage, and then some. Really thin. Doing this by hand is hard. Once rolled, cut into desired shape. Boil for a few minutes, until done. Eat at once.

Experiments with "Modernist" Cuisine; Momofuku-Inspired Green Beans

E had been soliciting me, somewhat, for gift ideas. One of which was delivered to me on Friday night, and a good gift it was - a kit from Modernist Pantry for doing all sorts of chemical things to food. I can now make foams, turn anything into a gel, and generally try cooking some crazier things. And, amazingly, Diablo III hasn't completely drained the life from me, coating my fingers in Cheeto dust and my veins into rivers of Mountain Dew. I actually haven't had any of those things in recent memory (except Diablo III, which I've had quite a bit of). We cooked a decidedly non-modernist dinner with a few  flourishes of weird using the other part of the food present - a trip to Sur La Table to pick up stuff that would be useful, but not necessary, in my kitchen.

The kitchenware trip got me a hand blender (for beating things, mostly) and a bamboo steamer (for making steamed things, of course). Given that and the chemicals, we settled on "grain and beans" for the main, steamed artichoke, green beans, salad with solid vinaigrette dressing, and a dessert that read like something between ice cream and whipped cream. The things I was in charge of (namely, the chemical cooking) were interesting. On the other hand, the things E was in charge of (all the other food but the green beans) were actually delicious, an important quality for food. She definitely won the award that night. 

Now, the chemicals: the vinaigrette was, roughly, your normal vinaigrette with agar agar added. Agar agar is crazy - like gelatin you would find in, say, Jello, but vegetarian and capable of holding up even under moderate heat. The texture worked - I made a sheet of vinaigrette that we could then cut and scatter on salad. E disagreed with the texture; I couldn't see the point other than Science! so it was deemed a failure. The dessert was similar - interesting texture, not much else going on. Perhaps I need better recipes aimed at a novice.

The rest of the meal is not quite befitting of a recipe - spinach pasta with black beans, seasoned lightly. Delicious steamed artichoke with mayonnaise. Green beans cooked in a bit of browned butter in a cast iron, tossed with a pinch of salt and freshly-grated horseradish, liberally adapted from a similar recipe in Momofuku, devoured before the rest of the meal was ready.

Herbal Tongue Twister

For this weekends cooking adventure, we pulled another recipe from The Herbal Kitchen. We've done two recipes from the book before, both excellent meals with no daunting prep. And, again, the book delivers an easy, delicious meal. It also contained my favorite ingredient (kale) and one of E's (pork). Sadly, my photos all came out rather blurry and I won't post the recipe because it is straight from a cookbook. Instead, you'll get the least-blurry of the photos and a brief description of the recipe - anyone who has cooked a few times should be able to figure something delicious out. Without further distractions, the meal complete with centerpiece:

The basic idea behind the meal is you take one hard to pronounce pasta (orecchiette) and one delicious pork product (pancetta). Try saying those together ten times. While the pasta cooks, you brown the pancetta then add in garlic and pepper flakes, followed by diced kale. As that begins to brown, you throw in a little liquid for the finish, add in the paste, and toss it with parmigiano-reggiano. You eat it and are happy. You have it for leftovers, cold, from the tupperware, and notice that it is more delicious that way.

White Bean/Butter Sauce Pasta with Browned Brussel Sprouts