Fresh Pasta
So, sometimes cooking leads you down dark, scary paths that seem hard to come back from. A perfect example of this is when you realize how simple it is to make your own tomato sauce. Next you decide to make your own sausage, then make your own ricotta, then you start thinking about making your own butter and then suddenly you have a farm in your back yard and you realize you’ve gone too far. However, while going down this path, making your own pasta is one that is worth the simple effort especially when paired with light, delicate sauces.
My brother and I decided to give it a shot. How hard could it be right? Well, with the wrong recipe and a new pasta rolling machine, it can be quite the hilarious task. We first started with differing recipes, my brother wanted to try a KitchenAid recipe while I wanted to attempt a Martha Stewart recipe. I know that the recipe for pasta dough is stupid simple but as I looked across all of my cookbooks, they all differed and varied in the amounts of the flour and egg and the amount they yielded.
At first I made a nice flour mound shaping it into a bowl, then I cracked the eggs into the middle, I started bringing in the flour and then like a fool I broke the wall and egg went everywhere. I started throwing flour down like it was a chemical spill. I managed to save the dough or so I thought. We kneaded it and the dough just never came together so we sat it aside. My brother then turned his attention to his KitchenAid recipe using his mixer to do the handy work, the recipe and the mixer didn’t offer much help. The dough was almost dried before we finished rolling it out. Almost completely defeated for failing to complete a stupid simple recipe I decided to open up the Ratio app on my iPhone by Michael Ruhlman. This book and app by the same name has intrigued me for a while, thinking how could this guy get something right that so many people have missed. In fact, I was thinking that Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio was the book for me, very formulaic in it’s ratios, giving you a base to start from.
I found the pasta dough recipe in Ratio and weighed the ingredients out and began mixing, then kneading, and finally resting. After resting, my brother and I rolled out the dough and started to use our pasta roller and cutter, it worked perfectly. We dried some for later and the rest threw into a pot of boiling water to go alongside a rough version of Scott Conant‘s tomato sauce I remember seeing on No Reservations. I remember the sauce being basic and simple to make but Scott always insisting it was fresh and light which is exactly what I was looking for to pair with my fresh pasta. Once the pasta was about 90% there I pulled it into a pan and finished it in the pan with the sauce to help the noodles soak up and bind well with the sauce. The end result was fantastic, light, airy and filling.
After this journey of making my own fresh pasta I wondered why anyone would buy fresh pasta instead of making it themselves. I understand if you don’t know how to make all the fancy noodles but for the basic strand or ribbon pasta like fettuccine, linguine, lasagne, or spaghetti; it’s incredibly simple to do it yourself.
To be honest, I wasn’t a believer in the ratio thing until I started seeing so many differing recipes for the same dish for the same serving size. This was when I started looking for something more standardize and when I found Ratio. If you haven’t read it yet you should, whether you’re new or experienced it is good to have these ratios by your side rather than ten recipe cards or books. Michael Ruhlman walks you through how to add almost any variation you can imagine which is the real power behind Ratio, enabling you to make recipes rather than super-powerful, celebrity chefs telling you what to make this month. I love this and think it is kind of cool to enable yourself to make your own recipes for basic stuff because now you know how not to mess up what you’re making. You can now add your own personal or cultural touch to anything without worrying about botching the whole thing.
Fresh Pasta Ratio Recipe
3 Parts Flour
2 Parts Eggs (Figure about 1 egg per serving)
Example: Roughly 2 Servings
6 Ounces Flour (weighed)
4 Ounces Egg (weighed)
Combine flour and egg and knead until smooth like any other pasta dough, nothing new or different but the ratio is dead on. After the ratio you treat the dough like any other pasta dough, rolling it out and cutting.
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primarily to see my friends and family, the time that I spend with them is always centered around food.
