Homemade Pasta

Sorry for the long absence - turns out it's a lot harder than I thought to get my computer and my cookbooks in the same place.

This has been a pretty carb-heavy week, but I'll start with the project I was most excited about - homemade linguine.

We made two types - regular, for lack of a better term, egg pasta, and spinach pasta (hence the green color).  On paper this process doesn't look so hard, but it took us a good hour or two to get it right.

The recipe and instructions come from a new cookbook I got for Christmas: "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking," by Marcella Hazan.  I'd give it a B: the wow factor was fun, but it was a lot of work to make and didn't have any particularly noticeable taste.

Yellow Pasta Dough
1 cup unbleached flour
2 eggs

Green Pasta Dough
1 1/2 cups unbleached flour
2 eggs
1/2 lb fresh spinach, cooked*

*To prepare the spinach, rinse with cold water, discard stems, and place in a pot.  Add 1/2 tsp salt and cook until the spinach is wilted, about 5 minutes.  Drain well, then squeeze the spinach gently with your hands or a towel to remove as much water as you can.  Chop finely.

To make the dough, begin by creating a well with your flour, then crack the eggs into the well.  As you can see, this looks quite cute until you try to follow the next direction: gently beat the eggs in the well for a minute or two.  At that point, we ended up with a dribbling mess.  So, Rob's suggestion is to beat the eggs in a bowl before adding them to the flour.  If you're making the spinach dough, you would also add the spinach to the eggs either in your flour well or in your bowl and beat that into the egg for a good minute or two.

But the mess doesn't end there!  No, once you've beaten the eggs, you get to start incorporating flour.  The book suggests doing this in stages, trying to keep some flour off to the side so that you can add flour as needed without letting the dough become too dry.  I found that I actually needed to add more flour than the original recipe called for - especially to the spinach dough.  Once you've incorporated enough flour to get the dough to stick together into a ball, knead the dough for up to 10 minutes until it becomes soft and smooth like a baby's butt. 

This next part can be done with a rolling pin, but since we just bought ourselves a pasta press for the crackers, we took the lazy route.  Take your ball of dough and divide it into 6 pieces.  Starting with one piece, smoosh it down so it's thin enough to feed through the pasta machine on its widest setting.  After feading it through, fold the dough over itself in thirds and feed it through the machine again.  Do this two or three times, then lay the strip of pasta on a clean towel and do the same to the other dough balls.  After flattening all the dough balls into strips, you can begin running each one through the machine, decreasing the width one setting at a time, until you end up with the width you want.  Then, let the dough dry for at least 10 minutes.  This prevents the strands from sticking together when you go to cut the pasta.  The pasta should be somewhat flexible, not brittle enough that it will crack when cut, but not moist enough to stick together.

The last step is to cut the pasta.  If you have a machine, just feed it through the desired cutting width tool and lay the cut pasta on towels to dry.  If you're doing it by hand, well, I'm sorry for you.  Perhaps you'd rather make lasagna with your pasta?  At any rate, the pasta should dry at least 15 minutes or so before cooking.  If you're not cooking the pasta the same day, you can wrap the cut pasta into balls and let those dry for 24 hours, then store them for a couple of weeks.  The drying is critical for stored pasta because it prevents mold from developing in your hard work.

We chose to pair our two pastas with a cream and proscuitto sauce, also from the same cookbook.  This sauce was very easy to make and delicious!  I always screw up cream sauces, but this one is impossible to mess up.

Proscuitto and Cream Sauce
1/4 pound sliced prosciutto
3 tbsp butter
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream (I accidentally bought heavy cream, worked just fine)
1 lb pasta
1/4 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese

Shred the proscuitto into narrow strips and cook in a saucepan with the butter for about 5-8 minutes on medium heat until browned (the original recipe says 2 minutes, but ours took longer).  Add the heavy cream and cook, stiring frequently, until the cream has reduced by 1/3 the volume.  The sauce also takes on a yellow tinge.  At that point, you're done - toss the pasta with the hot sauce and cheese and serve immediately.