THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601180038
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JERRY CRONIN, SPECIAL TO SUNDAY FLAVOR
LENGTH: Long : 119 lines
MAKING PASTA at home is easy. You don't need a machine, a fancy roller or a bagful of hard-to-find ingredients.
With 2/3 cup flour, a pinch of salt, an egg, a rolling pin and a sharp knife, you have the basis for fettuccine Alfredo, chicken ravioli in pesto sauce or any number of pasta dishes known around the world.
Whole supermarket aisles, indeed, are devoted to convenient, pre-packaged pastas in every form imaginable. But making pasta is fun.
You can experiment with shapes, such as spaghetti strands and ravioli squares; flavors, such as spinach or herb; and flours, such as buckwheat, whole wheat and rye.
Then come the fillings, such as meats and cheeses, limited only by your tastes and imagination.
Finally, homemade pasta just plain tastes good. Once you get the knack of making it, you may never buy boxed again.
Legend credits the Chinese with inventing pasta, and 13th century explorer Marco Polo with introducing it to the Western world.
The Italians probably lead the world in pasta making, having created hundreds of varieties. Each length, width, shape and ingredient gives rise to a different type, suited to a different use by the way it feels in the mouth and how it interacts with other ingredients.
Thin angel hair pasta, for example, is heavenly topped with a light seafood sauce. Wider noodles, such as fettuccine, are perfect for holding creamy sauces. Very wide lasagna noodles separate the layers of a delicious baked pie, while ravioli hold their secrets stuffed inside.
Many advanced pasta shapes are best made by machine, but you can easily make most everyday varieties at home.
Start with a batch of fettuccine for two: Place your 2/3 cup flour in a mixing bowl, add 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1 large egg. Mix the ingredients with a fork, switching to floured hands once the ingredients are somewhat combined.
The mixture should be firm, not sticky. Otherwise, gradually add flour until it becomes a resilient ball of dough. If the mixture isn't wet enough, leaving flour on the sides of the bowl and crumbling, add water, 1/4 teaspoon at a time, until a soft pliable ball forms.
Next, take the ball out of the bowl and knead it between your hands for 10 to 15 minutes. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let it rest for 15 to 20 minutes, then divide the dough into pieces. On a floured surface, use a rolling pin to roll the dough out to the desired thickness.
Allow the pasta to dry for 20 minutes before cutting. Then, using a sharp knife, cut the pasta into 1/4-inch strips. (To cut long strips quickly, fold the sheet over itself a few times and cut the strips with long strokes of the knife, unrolling the strips as you go along.)
To cook your pasta, bring a large pot of salted water to a rapid boil, as you would for store-bought pasta. If you like, add a tablespoon or two of vegetable oil to the water to keep the pasta from sticking. Add the pasta, keeping the water at a boil. Fresh pasta cooks more quickly than does packaged: your fettuccine will be ready for saucing in three to five minutes.
Once you get the knack of making and rolling the dough, consider other pasta-bilities: Cut the dough into 1/8-inch strips for spaghetti; 1/4-inch strips for tagliatelle; 3-inch strips for lasagna. Or make the dough out of whole wheat and cut 1/2-inch noodles for bigoli. Cutting wheels sold in specialty shops will allow you to cut many strips with one slice, by rolling the wheel across the pasta sheets.
From here, experiment with stuffed pastas, such as ravioli or tortellini. Just keep a couple of tips in mind:
Prepare your filling so it cooks for the same length of time as the pasta. For meats and most vegetables, this means cooking the filling beforehand. Pestos and cheese mixtures will cook with the pasta.
Keep fillings firm to prevent them from falling apart as you assemble your morsels. Also consider what will happen after you cook the pasta: A filling of pure soft cheese may become too runny, for example. Binders, such as bread crumbs or egg, help the filling set as it cooks.
To make ravioli, roll out two equal-sized sheets of pasta dough. Distribute the filling on the first sheet in little piles of about a teaspoon each. Make an egg wash by adding a few drops of water to a well scrambled egg, and coat the spacing between piles with a pastry brush. Take your second sheet and place it over the first, tamping down the material to enclose the filling in little packets. Using a knife, cut the ravioli into squares. For a different shape, use a round biscuit cutter.
To make tortellini, cut the dough into squares and place the filling in the center. Fold the square into a triangle and then wrap the points together so it looks like a bandana. You can vary the size of the squares.
Prepare the filled pastas by gently sliding them into boiling water, cooking them for three to five minutes.
Create a simple sauce by boiling the ravioli or tortellini in enough chicken stock to cover the pieces as they cook. The dough will cause the stock to thicken. Remove the ravioli with a slotted spoon; pour the stock, or sauce, over the pieces. MECHANICAL MEANS
If you get hooked on homemade pastas, you might want to invest in a roller or pasta machine.
A variety of hand- or machine-cranked rollers are on the market. They pass the dough through a pair of flat rollers set at progressively smaller gaps until the correct thickness of pasta is attained. The dough then passes through blades that cut the pasta. Various other blades are available, including ones that let you to add filling.
Rollers maintain the texture of handmade pasta while producing uniform sizes, but you still have to knead the dough before rolling it to thickness.
Or you can turn to the most recent innovation in homemade pasta: machines similar to those that make bread. You add specified ingredients, flip a switch and let the machine mix and knead. When firm, the dough is pushed through holes for the correct thickness. You ease the pasta from the machine and cut it to the desired length.
But whether you use a knife, roller or automatic machine, your creative juices likely will flow, along with delicious pastas of many shapes and sizes. MEMO: Jerry Cronin is a free-lance writer and avid cook living in Norfolk.
ILLUSTRATION: FILE COLOR PHOTO
Once you get the knack of making homemade pasta, you may never buy
boxed again.
by CNB