Practical alchemy: pasta
Food at its finest is simple yet satisfying and few foods can meet these criteria better than Pasta. With more than 4,000 years of refinement and experimentation under it's belt it's no surprise that noodles are a staple for much of the world. The best part about it is how quick and easy fresh egg pasta is to make.
The dried pasta you can buy from grocery stores are simply flour mixed with water. As easy as dumping dried pasta into boiling water is fresh pasta is easy too, taking only a few extra minutes to mix and knead the dough. Since I started cooking I've discovered the true joy that fresh egg based noodles bring, packing more flavor and a richer texture into your meal.
Much of my fascination with pasta stems from its versatility: once pasta dough has been mixed and kneaded, it can be formed into sheets and then cut into spaghetti, linguini, ravioli, or virtually any other form. From there the base pasta can be cooked and served as is with a light drizzle of olive oil or presented with any number of sauces or other accompaniments.
Click through for the noodley details on how to make fresh pasta yourself.
Pasta is a perfect example of practical alchemy in that it is made of only two very basic ingredients, and yet produces delicious food. Simply combining flour and eggs results in a basic pasta dough. Michael Ruhlmans' Ratio suggests 5 parts flour to 3 parts egg by weight, although acknowledges that this is a very vague guideline and pretty much any combination of eggs and flour will work.
The 5:3 weight ratio works out to about 1/2 cup flour for each large egg. Personally I've found myself gravitating to putting in a little bit more flour and making it more of a 2:1 ratio. This works out to a generous 1/2 cup of flour (say 2/3 cup perhaps) per egg and produces a denser, chewier noodle. Each egg used in this ratio makes for roughly a single serving of pasta. By scaling this up it's just as easy to make pasta for a single person as for 10, just plop an egg per person in the bowl and measure out the appropriate amount of flour before mixing.
Once the flour and eggs are in the bowl mixing is very straightforward.The first few times I tried it using my fingers to mix things and everything got quite messy. A food processor was suggested as an alternative and while the food processor does indeed mix the dough together well it is a pain to clean up. So far I've had the most success with mixing the flour and the eggs with a fork in the bowl prior to plopping on the counter for kneading.
Kneading the dough is the most important step of the overall process. Kneading allows the gluten in the flour to form into long chains of gluten and protein which make the dough stretchy and elastic. Prior to kneading, the dough is goopy and wouldn't stick together during the rolling and shaping process. It took me a few tries to get the hang of kneading, but now that I've got it there is a bit of a zen like quality to it.
The first trick with kneading is that the surface you are kneading on must be well floured to prevent the dough from sticking to it. My first attempts didn't use nearly enough flour and thus the dough stuck to everything and made rolling and the cleanup after I was done far more difficult than it needed to be. With each subsequent batch I increased the amount of flour laid down and things worked better and better. It's important to note that the flour laid down gets incorporated into the dough so even though I like to start with a 2:1 flour to egg ratio I likely end up with dough that's 7:3 by the time the kneading is done.
The best technique I've come up with is to fold the dough over itself lengthwise, and then press it together with the heel of my hand before rotating and repeating. Five to ten minutes of this and the dough will progress from gooey to the consistency of chewing gum that's lost its flavor. Then it's ready. The more kneading you do the more elastic the dough will be and thus the more chewy the end result will be. I've read that too much kneading will break down the dough, but thankfully I haven't hit that threshold yet myself.
Once the dough is ready form it into a ball and wrap it in some plastic wrap to sit for at least 10 minutes. This lets the gluten chains that were created by the kneading relax into each other. This plastic-wrapped dough ball can be rolled and cut after the 10 minutes, or will last up to a day in the fridge if you want to prepare the dough ahead of your meal.
Once you are ready to prepare the meal itself re-flour a large surface and plop the dough ball onto it for rolling out into a sheet. If you are making more than a single serving of pasta it may be easiest to cut the dough into several 1-2 portion sized lumps and roll each one independently. Rolling itself is very straightforward, but something that took a few tries for me to get down pat. So far my most successful technique came from watching Chris and Jinny make Ravioli: roll the dough in one direction a few times, pick it up and flip it over turning 90 degrees at the same time and roll out in that same direction again. By rolling and flipping like this, the dough stays well floured from the counter top (and thus does not stick to the rolling pin) and is easier to get very flat.
Once the dough is rolled into sheets, it can be cut into any desired shape using either a knife, or a rolling pizza cutter. Pretty much any shape will work and the process is wide open to creativity. Personally, I'm a fan of both 1" square shaped pieces of pasta and of flat fettucini. The easiest way to get perfect straight lines when cutting long pasta like fettucini is to roll the flat piece of well floured dough into a log and cut the log into slices leaving you with perfect spirals of dough.
Now that the pasta is cut and ready you can toss it in some boiling water and you are ready to go. The water should be seasoned with salt to both increase it's boiling temperature as well as to add a little salty flavor to the pasta. The Weekly Geek's, Chris, suggests heavily salted water "tasting of the sea", although I've had success with less salty water as well - individual preference changes everything so experimentation is encouraged.
While dried pasta takes some time (9-15 minutes) to cook, fresh pasta takes much less time. Particularly if you rolled the dough very thin, the cooking time may be as little as 3-4 minutes. To see if it's done, extract a piece with a spoon and take a bite after blowing it cool.
Once it's done, simply drain the pasta in a colander, toss with a tiny bit of olive oil to prevent the pasta from sticking to itself and you are ready to serve. Fresh pasta is delicious by itself with just the olive oil and perhaps a little salt, but can be a phenomenal base for any number tasty sauces and other accompaniments.
And there you have it - in a few short minutes alchemy has occurred- simple flour and eggs have been transformed into delicious, ready-to-eat pasta! Shout out in the comments if you like the article, or have additional variations or techniques to suggest that myself and the readers can try out!
--Sparky
