Today was a light-consumption day. I watched an episode from an online cooking course and now I know how to make fresh pasta.
Fresh Pasta
I watched an episode of the Great Courses course titled “Rediscover the Lost Art of Cooking.” The lesson was “From Fettuccine to Orecchiette: Fresh and Dry Pastas.” In the episode, Chef Briwa shows the way to cook pasta (in salted, boiling water). More interestingly, he shows how to make fresh pasta.
Fresh pasta is a time investment, but not too difficult to make. It only requires flour, eggs, and water, but technique is important. Here’s what I learned,
- Put your flour in a food processor.
- Begin slowly mixing the flour and adding eggs one at a time (a ratio of 1 egg per .25 lbs flour). Mix until the dough looks like “wet cascading sand.”
- Remove the dough from the food processor and press it together. At this time, you can use a pasta roller or knead it by hand. The former is faster and is what Chef Briwa recommends.
- Feed the pressed dough through the pasta roller. Fold it together and feed it through again. Continue this folding and rolling until it’s the texture of “smooth leather.”
- Put the dough in a bag and let it rest 20-30 minutes. If the dough is sticky at all, toss it with flour. You never want the dough to stick to itself when making pasta.
- After it has rested, continue folding and rolling the dough until it is the desired thickness. Understand that pasta will probably double in size while cooking.
- Cut the dough to the preferred noodle size. Some rollers come with an attachment that can cut the dough to a preset noodle size.
- Toss in flour and cornmeal to prevent sticking.
- It’s ready to cook! Bring salted water to a boil. As Chef Briwa says, “Pasta likes to swim.” Use approximately 6 times as much water as pasta.
- Alternatively, you can dry it and save it for later.
If you want to know why I’m taking a cooking course right now, check out the Launch post for my April 2020 experiment: Avoiding Heavily Processed Foods.
Believe it or not, that’s it for today. Otherwise, I spent the day working, writing, cooking, etcetera. I hope you’re safe during this pandemic.
The feature image is by Sheila Joy on Unsplash.
