I should mention here that to my understanding tomato sauces aren’t usually paired with fresh egg pastas. It’s considered something of a no-no in Italian food circles. In my own defense, this isn’t so much a tomato sauce as it is a meat sugo with a little tomato added. Judges? I made this pasta using […]
READ ONBy no means. However there are more than a few purists out there (the majority of them Italian) who turn their noses up at pastas made via mechanical rollers. What difference could that possibly make versus a rolling pin? Well, pasta dough is plastic and malleable. Porous wooden surfaces like pins and boards press a […]
READ ONWhile it may (repeat may) be true that the Chinese were the true originators of the noodle, nowadays most food historians treat the noodle-making of the East and that of the West as entirely separate traditions. I think it’s fair to do so, if only because the materials they’re made from and the manner in […]
READ ON…is pretty much all this is. We’ve had a sparse, late pea season here in Kentucky this year, but man, are the ones we have ever sweet. Blanch two cups of them for two minutes, then immerse them in a cold water bath. Next, heat two tablespoons of olive oil and a tablespoon of butter […]
READ ONSo where did pasta come from exactly? Nobody knows. It could have been Italy, might have been China, was perhaps the Middle East, but then might have been someplace else altogether. Anyplace people were cultivating wheat and pounding it into flour. The thing is, boiling a paste of flour and water (like cooking it on […]
READ ONHands down the most common mistake people make when cooking pasta is failing to salt their water properly. A teaspoon or two per gallon is about the maximum for most cooks. Yet that’s not nearly enough. As a good Italian friend of mine is fond of saying: it must taste like the sea! And that […]
READ ONI have trouble making my pasta “the authentic way”. That is, mounding up my little flour volcano, dropping eggs in the center and beating them up with a fork. I always get a breach in the wall, which sends partly scrambled egg spilling out all over the place. I don’t like the mess, but even […]
READ ONHey wait a second, these taste like egg noodles! And indeed strands of homemade fettucine will if you make them from the same base material as their Swedish equivalents, which is to say soft, finely ground white flour. There’s not a thing wrong with that, of course. Standard all-purpose flour makes fantastic pasta. However to […]
READ ONIt’s said that if you want to taste cream, make panna cotta. If you want to taste butter, croissants are your bet. If you want to taste eggs, omelets. But if you want to taste grain, if you really really want to taste grain, then you can’t do any better than pasta. Breads, especially those […]
READ ONI know, it’s not pastry. And no, for those of you who remember the 80’s, I’m not planning on making any of those dessert pastas that were all the rage back then: chocolate lasagna, blueberry tortellini, raspberry ravioli with white chocolate crème Anglaise…what a nightmare all that was. Nope, this week it’ll be standard homemade […]
READ ON