Edible and Audible

Homemade pasta – some flour, some eggs, a little oil – how fucking hard could it be? If you’ve spent any time in my kitchen the last few years you would know the answer to that is “apparently very”. I’ve tried all sorts of recipes with small victories along the way, but at the end I’m always left with that feeling of dread, knowing that I would have be better off lighting the pasta dough on fire than adding insult by ingesting some inedible rubbery crap only for purposes of justifying the effort that I put into making it. The other night I had a breakthrough, a pasta dough that came together and produced a lovely pasta meal, one I was proud (or at least less ashamed) to serve and eat. At this point I’ve tried several recipes/techniques and figured I’d tell the world (and by world I mean the two people reading this site. And by two people I mean myself.) what finally worked for me. Keep in mind I’m not slagging these recipes that didn’t happen to work for me, it’s much more a symptom of my own pasta incompetence than any sort of failure on the recipe’s part.

Attempt #1 – Saveur recipe

The big issue I initially had with this recipe is the flour well on the counter top. I’ve seen TV chefs (Batali, Bastianich, etc) use this exact same approach with great results, but each time I tried to slowly incorporate the flour walls, the relatively small amount of liquid would quickly absorb the immediately surrounding flour leaving a relatively well formed ball of dough in the middle of the remaining flour. Try to incorporate that flour and I’m left with a dry, crumbly mess that never really comes together and falls apart once kneading begins. This is a classic recipe, I know it can work – I mean come on, Saveur is the hot shit – but it just didn’t work for me. Making pasta 1, Steve 0.

Attempt #2 – The Paupered Chef interpretation of the Saveur recipe

The Paupered Chef is one of my favorite food blogs; those guys have steered me down delicious avenues time and time again. Reading they too had trouble with fresh pasta temporarily raised my self-esteem just enough to get me back on the horse. They essentially used the aforementioned Saveur recipe, with one important difference – instead of making a flour well on the counter top, they just mixed all the ingredients in a bowl, ensuring a more even mixture of flour and wet ingredients. This was giant step forward for me in the sense I was able to consistently put together a dough ball, but I still struggled in making the dough ball consistently smooth and moist enough to hold together under rigorous kneading and rolling out. I started to realize that part of the problem I had was the wet/dry ratio was weighted too heavily in the dry ingredients (i.e. the flour) – after a few attempts I tried to up the eggs and oil and in turn produced somewhat better results. This recipe also got me thinking about flour types – I bought a few bags of semolina to compare with all-purpose flour, but at $4 for a small bag it started to become disheartening to waste that on my failed experiments. Let’s give making pasta a half-point for this round as I did learn a few things. Making pasta 1.5, Steve 0.

Attempt #3 – Al di La recipe on Serious Eats

Al di La might be my favorite Italian spot in all of NYC; when I came across this recipe I figured it was time to give this thing one more shot. This recipe is strikingly different from the Saveur recipe and aligned with my findings in Attempt #2 by having a much higher wet/dry ratio. It also used the mix-in-bowl method that I found significantly improved my chances. Finally, it even recommended all-purpose flour, which gave me the confidence I wouldn’t be pissing my money away after yet another failure. As I started to incorporate the dough it was incredibly sticky, so much so that I almost abandoned it completely. Sticking to my fingers to the point where I couldn’t even mix anymore. But after a bit more flour it all came together beautifully, a slightly sticky but fairly elastic dough that was ready for kneading. After about ten minutes of kneading I wrapped it up for about 45 minutes and then proceeded to roll out just enough to fit in the pasta roller (if you have a Kitchen-Aid mixer the pasta roller attachment does a good job). Beautifully thin pasta ensued. Success! Tossed with a light butter/vermouth/garlic sauce, topped with parmesean, and dinner was served.

What would I do differently next time? First, I want to try this recipe with Semolina flour as I have to imagine a fuller, more pasta-y taste might result, though the all-purpose flour did produce a very light and airy pasta, time will tell which one I prefer. Second, I overcooked this pasta slightly, but I think I need to let the pasta dry a bit before cooking to give a little bit of an al dente texture. There’s still much to learn, but for one day the stars aligned and I didn’t have to break out the backup dried pasta.

To summarize, if you’re having problems with fresh pasta and you’re willing to try some different plans of attack:

• Make sure the wet/dry ratio is weighted heavily enough on the wet side, and remember that it’s easier to add flour to an overly sticky/moist dough than it is to add moisture to an overly dry dough.
• Blend dough ingredients in a bowl to ensure proper melding of ingredients. I won’t tell your Tuscan grandmother.