Adventures in pasta-making.

I've recently had a birthday, and my lovely husband bought me the present I really wanted: the pasta roller and cutter attachments for my kitchen aid mixer.  Pasta has been around since 1154 and for years I've been wanting to have a go at making my own, but never got around to it.  According to Wikipedia Italians eat sixty pounds in weight of pasta per person per year, and they have to import wheat to make it as their individual consumption exceeds the average production of wheat in the country.

The kitchen aid attachment is fab because there's no turning handles, the rollers turn automatically at a speed set by you, and you have both hands free to manoeuvre the dough, which makes it so much easier. Another bonus is that it comes with two cutting attachments for spaghetti and fettucine (it says tagliatelle on the box but the word fettucine is actually etched into the metal - anyway one is just a slightly bigger version of the other) - so you can almost effortlessly create perfect spaghetti or ribbons of pasta which would be tricky by hand.

There is also a ravioli maker but that costs a whopping £90 extra so I think when I try that it'll be hand crafted...

The attachment - attached!

Close up of the rollers.

 Feeding the dough through, to knead and thin it.

The cutting attachment...

The finished dish: fettucine with salmon, asparagus and peas in a crème fraiche, lemon and dill sauce.  The hubby's verdict: "I'm never eating dried pasta again!"

 

 

You get an idea of the process from the photos, but I need to go back to the beginning of the story.....

  

The first thing you need to make pasta is the right kind of flour, you can't just use bog standard SmartPrice Plain flour.  It took a bit of hunting down but I got there in the end.  I was hopeful that I would find it in our large local supermarket, and at first I thought they didn't have any.  So I phoned my brother-in-law and sister-in-law who are pasta pros and make it all the time to find out where they source their flour.  It turned out they bought it from Carluccio's and they kindly offered to get me some the next time they get some for themselves, together with some semolina flour which is apparently great for dusting the finished pasta with before cooking to give the correct "bite".  However, I wanted to get started that very day as I had promised the family fresh pasta for dinner so I rang two other  nearby supermarkets who did stock it but didn't happen to have any in at the moment.  Disappointed, I had one more look at the flour section and hiding at the bottom, at the back, and happily on special offer too I found "00 Grade Premium Plain Flour" and in smaller writing "suitable for pastry, sauces and pasta"!!  00 grade flour uses the purest, whitest, central part of the wheat (or so the packet says).  The resulting flour is incredibly silky and white and blends more easily with fats and liquid than other flours. I was very happy and hot footed it home to start experimenting. 

 

 

 

Although you can make the dough easily enough just on the worktop and knead it by hand, I thought as I did have a mixer why not make use of it?  So I followed the instructions and mixed the flour and eggs with the flat beater, changed to the dough hook and kneaded for two minutes, then another two minutes by hand.  Then it needs to chill and rest for a bit.  The kitchen aid recipe book said one hour, the kitchen aid instructions for the pasta attachment said 20 minutes, the sister-in-law said it's supposed to be ten but a couple will do!  I can't remember what we did in the end but it wasn't very long.  Then came the fun part.

 

The dough was divided into three portions to make it easier to handle, then flattened out with a rolling pin before feeding it through the rollers with the mixer on speed 2.  The rollers start out quite far apart and as you feed it through more and more times you adjust the rollers (easily, no faffing about) from setting 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5.  The dough gets passed through several times (between 5 and ten times on each setting, folding in half each time until you get to setting 5), ending up with really thin pasta ready for cutting with the other attachment(s).  This may seem like a bit of a palaver but actually it's fast and fun without having to turn a handle! After cutting you can dry it but if you're going to cook it straight away there's no need.  I found when dropped into salted water at a rolling boil it took about 5 minutes to cook, I'm sure it depends on the size and thickness of the pasta and how "al dente" you like it as I know people who only cook fresh pasta for 45 seconds.

 

So - my first attempt at pasta was a success, and my daughter enjoyed it too, so much so that she wants to make us fresh pasta for dinner when we come home form work!  Yes please. 

 

I think there's a lot of conflicting information out there, and I've got a lot to learn and a lot of experimenting to do - the aforementioned brother-in-law and sister-in-law have given me tips already, such as using a pizza wheel to cut it up, and putting garlic oil in the water, but I'm sure there will be a "further adventures in pasta-making" blog post in the future.  I want to use some really good free range eggs (there's a lady at work who sells them from her chickens) to get a better yellow colour, for example. I'd also like to experiment with adding other ingredients to the mixture, making ravioli and tortelloni etc. Also need to get the portion sizes sorted, we used 300g flour and 3 eggs between four of us and there wasn't any left, maybe we were just keen for the first ever helping...

 

Thank you for reading.  Feel free to comment, or share this blog with anyone who you think might like to read it.

 

Caroline x



 

A passion for fruit (Part 2)

Ok, so at the end of the last post I had gooseberries and blackcurrants to use up.  A friend told me about her Mum's gooseberry flan with German "biscuit pastry" so I thought I'd have a go at that.  The biscuit pastry was made in an entirely different way to any pastry I'd made before, and it used vanilla sugar which I liked the sound of.  You stir the dry ingredients together, add milk, then cut the cold fat onto it and knead together.  Maybe I was doing it wrong but I found the end result a bit dry and crumbly and tricky to roll out.  I did manage to get it into the tin eventually, but some of it went in jigsaw puzzle fashion.  The recipe said to roll out a long sausage and put it around the edges, but it was too dry for this so I just squashed the remains of the pastry into the sides of the tin and blind baked it.  Then I added the gooseberries (stewed with sugar and the juice drained off) and glazed with the juice cooked with a bit more sugar and some cornflour to thicken in a pan.  I finished it with some blanched almonds I happened to have in the cupboard, gently toasted in the oven.

 

I liked the end result, but some family members would have preferred more sugar in the gooseberries, and I'm not sure I'd make the biscuit pastry again, I'll probably use the sweet pastry recipe made in the processor that I'm used to but substitute vanilla sugar.

 

As for the blackcurrants, I had found a recipe on the BBC food website for blackcurrant and mint sorbet.  I had all the ingredients, including plenty of mint growing in the garden and liquid glucose in the cupboard.  I started by making a sugar syrup and steeping a big handful of mint leaves in it.  When it was cool I discarded the mint and cooked the blackcurrants in the syrup with liquid glucose, which stops the formation of too many ice crystals, good for someone like me who doesn't have an ice cream maker.  When soft, the fruit was whizzed in the processor then pushed through a metal sieve to get rid of the pips.  The juice of two lemons was added and the mixture allowed to cool.  Then I froze it in a lunchbox, giving it a mash with a potato masher two or three times over a few hours.  And that was it.  Most refreshing.

Another fruity recipe I've made only this morning was a raspberry variation on a lemon meringue pie.  I thought, just for once and for an experiment, I'd do something I'd never done before and use a pre made pastry case, bought from the supermarket.  I wasn't holding out too much hope, as it's best before date was December (can pastry really keep that long?) and the ingredients list revealed it was made with margarine which I am not a fan of, but to be honest it wasn't that bad.

The raspberry mixture was made by pureeing the raspberries, again using the sieve to de pip them, and mixing with melted butter, sugar, 3 whole eggs and 2 extra yolks in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water.  I was cursing myself as I tried to separate the eggs and kept getting bits of yolk in the whites reserved for the meringue topping... I put them in the fridge for scrambled egg later.  The raspberry mixture took ages to thicken, I hate recipes that say "cook until thick" without giving you any idea if that will take 45 seconds or 45 minutes!  I made notes for this blog with the other hand while I was stirring it!!  Eventually it did thicken and was poured into the pastry case and cooked for 15 minutes.  This led me to a other downside of the bought pastry case.  Not big enough!!  So I poured the rest of the mixture into a cereal bowl to make a smaller pastry free version (suitable for coeliacs!!) Then the egg whites were whisked with sugar and cream of tartar to make the meringue which was blobbed on top, styled with a palette knife and baked for another ten minutes.  And the end result was a good four and a half out of five, probably would have been a five with home made pastry.  I wonder if anyone else has had warm raspberry meringue pie for breakfast?

 

 

I've just discovered dropbox.  It's one of those things, like the amazon cloud player, that everyone else has probably been using for ages but I've only just found out about.  It makes adding photos to my blog so easy, take with phone or upload from camera and ping! they are on all computers including my netbook so wherever I am, I can find them easily.  Genius.

 

I'm going to Wales on holiday in a few days, so hoping to have some delicious Welsh foodie experiences.  More posts soon.

 

Thank you for reading,

 

Caroline :-)