Pastafest: Day One
Fettuccine and Garlic Oil Sauce
Something magical happened today. Despite the snowstorm, my Imperia pasta machine arrived this morning! I used to think I had no strong feelings about pasta. I found it a generally inoffensive carb-y vehicle for delivering broccoli and such to my mouth. After making my own for the first time today however, I have developed very strong opinions on the subject. I now know that fresh, homemade pasta is awesome and should be consumed by everyone (but mostly me) all of the time. Not a practical desire, I know, as tonight's dinner seriously violated my 1 hr. active cook time rule. Nevertheless, I am now a changed woman who will always look just a little bit askance at her dried pasta jar.
Details and pasta-making pics after the jump
I wanted to try something very basic for my first attempt, so I went with Mark Bittman's pasta recipe in HTCEV. It's a flour, salt, egg, and water mixture mostly "kneaded" in the food processor (hey, I make my pie crusts in the food processor too, no reason to turn purist and start building flour mounds on the counter now) and shaped into a ball to rest for 30 min. or so.
The most complicated part might have been clamping the machine to the counter (which, as it turns out, is really important). I had to open a drawer and clamp it inside.
Rolling out pasta is fairly intuitive. If you played with play-dough as a kid, you've mastered the physics of it already. Working with part of the dough as a time, you use the settings on the machine to roll it into an increasingly longer and thinner sheet, adding flour as needed to prevent sticking.
Then you feed said sheet through a cutter attachment. My machine came with both a spaghetti and fettuccine cutter, I decided to go with the latter.
Magic!
At this point, I was starting to feel pretty awesome and accomplished, I'm not gonna lie. Like some kind of talented uberchef creating something lovely and special out of flour and eggs. I like it when things look much harder than they actually are. After hanging the pasta to dry, I cleaned up a bit and started boiling water and prepping the sauce.
There are three conventional rules that govern pasta cooking: 1) you must use a huge vat of water, 2) that vat must come to a rolling boil before you add the pasta, 3) the water should taste like the ocean (add a fistful of salt). I usually ignore the first two of these rules (but never the last) and cook pasta in a saucepan, adding it at a weak boil, because do you know how long it takes to boil a vat of water? Way, way too long. I remembered this inconvenient fact tonight as I glared at my vat of sad, small bubbles that refused to roll. Oh, why had I decided to play by the rules all of a sudden with my fancy homemade pasta? At any rate, boil it did (eventually), and the pasta was perfectly done at 3 and a half minutes. I wanted a light sauce that would highlight the noodles, so I tossed the fettuccine with a hot garlic oil sauce (just olive oil and chopped garlic simmered in a pan until golden), and topped with parmesan cheese. I served the dish with a spinach/apple/walnut side salad topped with a balsamic vinaigrette (olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and dijon mustard wisked together).
It was . . . a revelation. Tomorrow I'm experimenting with filled pasta . . . Butternut Squash ravioli!
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