I have made may be 4 batches of fresh pasta in this couple of weeks. I have now developed a work flow that is efficient and least fuss. Once you tasted good fresh pasta, it is very difficult to lower yourself to eat those made from dried, except for the reason of expedience. It will continue to eat dried pasta occasionally, especially when camping with Brunnhilde.
The pasta that I have been making is fettuccine. I like to make them relatively thin. By making them thin I maximize their surface area. It is relatively undercognized that a lot of Italian pasta are designed and refined to have attributes to retain the sauce. These can be nooks and crannies, or rough surface texture like found in short pasta. They can also be surface area found on long pasta like angel hair or fettuccine. They all have something in common, high surface area to weight ratio.
A most common mistake of cooking pasta is, not giving the opportunity for the pasta to co-mingle with the sauce enough, or squander the starchy liquid that helps thicken the sauce which promote adhesion to the pasta.
For me I found the best batch size is made with:
- 1 cup of flour - 2/3 Durum and 1/3 unbleached
- 1 egg
- 1/4 tsp of salt
- sufficient of water to make the dough the right consistency
I like to save the leftovers and keep in the refrigerator. I found the best way for this is to portion them in the serving plate while the food is still hot. This way you lose the least of the precious sauce. I use a silicon spatula to scrap off the last drop of sauce. I then cover the top with a plastic food wrap.
these are to be my foodies' TV dinners (or real tasty choice) stored in the refrigerator
When it come time to reheat the left over, I don't use a microwave oven. I rarely use my microwave oven because it ruins the food most of the time by super-heating the water molecules. Here is what I recently discovered the best way. I place the whole plate of pasta over a pot with diameter slightly smaller than the plate. This allow the plate to rest above the pot which contain water. I set the pot on the burner at low heat, with a lid cover the food. In about 20 minutes the pasta is piping hot and very close to the quality when it was just made. I do this over steaming because steaming tends to introduce more water and make the exposed pasta soggy.
my trusty pasta machine - such great tool and will last longer than me
The way I make the thin fettuccine on the pasta machine is I don't just feed the dough into the linguine cutter. If I do the noodle is way too thick due to the design of the extruder/cutter. It is set and cannot the change. To get around this. I roll the dough through the rollers, in increments of decreasing thickness. Once the 4 pieces of dough have been rolled, I then cut them and immediately blench each batch separately. This workflow let me skip having to fuss with a pasta rack to preventing the strands from sticking together. I only need mo stir in a tablespoonful of olive oil to prevent the pasta from sticking together while they rest until I get to them again in the preparation of the final dish.
the four pieces of dough will roll out nicely into 4 small batches of fettuccine which i blench immediately
just more the less slight variation of fettuccine with crab, cuttlefish, and clams; there are three servings
the truth is with my cooking, not all meals are sunshine; against my better judgement i decided to scoop in a couple teaspoons of pesto sauce; the basil clashed with the otherwise very subtle ginger, scallion, and the mild seafood flavors
I just finished using up all the shellfish that I bought, so I will give this recipe a rest and try something new.
