Pasta! Homemade, hand rolled pasta… That’s what was for dinner on Sunday. Hand-crafted little ravioli marvels, full of crab and cheese, and served in a tasty four-cheese hollandaise sauce with extra bits of seafood for flavor. And that’s what’s behind the big gap in posting this week.
Sunday was my first go at homemmade pasta. For those of you who haven’t tried making pasta before, it’s not too tough if you’ve got the right bits of kitchen gear. With a food proceesor and a pasta roller, all you need is semolina flour, a bunch of eggs and some salt, and you’re in business. If, like me, you don’t have a pasta roller, you can, theoretically, roll out the pasta by hand using a rolling pin.
You can also, theoretically, nail your arm down to a cutting board using only a meat tenderizing mallet and some shrimp forks. I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but it’s theoretically possible.
In much the same way, hand made pasta with a rolling pin is possible, but not necessarily a good idea. And it’ll make your arms hurt a lot for a couple of days afterwards.
Probably not as much as the whole shrimp fork idea. I’m not going to test that. In fact, let’s just forget I even brought it up.
Rolling pasta involves taking a well-kneaded lump of dough, rolling it out flat, then folding it up and rolling it out flat again, but just a little bit thinner this time. Repeat this about eight times per lump of dough, with four lumps of dough for a double noodle recipie, and you’ll realize why they invented the crank-driven contraption that most people use.
In some ways, it’s kind of like making an edible version of a Samurai sword, except you’re folding and re-folding sheets of egg and flour instead of red-hot steel.