Super Simple Homemade Pasta

Make Spaghetti, Penne, Linguini, Bucatini, Tagliatelle, Ravioli, and More in Your Own Home Kitchen

Aliza Green

• Publisher: New Shoe Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780760379561
• eBook ISBN: 9780760379578
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

Making pasta at home is easy, fun, and satisfyingly delicious with this easy-to-follow, photo-illustrated guide

Even if you have no experience at all, you can make Italian pasta like a professional chef in your own home kitchen with the Super Simple Handmade Pasta cookbook, adapted from the best-selling Making Artisan Pasta by James Beard Award–winning author Aliza Green. Perfect for the beginning cook, this book walks you through selecting ingredients and tools, how to use a pasta machine, and shaping, filling, and flavoring pasta—plus how to cook it perfectly and serving ideas. There is nothing complicated in these recipes—only delicious results!

Perfect the classic egg semolina pasta and also learn how to make all sorts of flavored pastas, from the more common tomato spinach pastas to shaped noodles flavored with herbs and spices including basil, chives, pepper, or saffron. Also explore unexpected flavors like beet and sweet potato and even chocolate, all made by hand.

Super Simple Homemade Pasta features:
 

• Recipes for pasta doughs—Make your own pasta doughs with classic ingredients including buckwheat and whole wheat flour, roasted red pepper, spinach, squash, mushroom, chocolate, and more.
• Step-by-step photo instructions—Following the simple, clear instructions, learn to use a pasta sheeter, an extruder, and a cavatelli maker as well as roll, cut, shape, and stuff dough for gnocchi, lasagna, cannelloni, pappardelle, tagliatelle, ravioli, and dozens of other types of classic Italian pasta.
• Helpful tips—Expert advice and serving suggestions will ensure pasta so beautiful and delicious your family and guests will be clamoring for more.

No need to serve dry, boxed, or frozen pasta again once you’ve easily mastered the recipes in Super Simple Homemade Pasta.

PART I

The Basics

CHAPTER 1

Pasta Ingredients

In this chapter, you’ll learn the techniques of making fresh pasta dough. Like bread, pasta is created from the most basic of ingredients—at its simplest just flour and water, though for handmade artisan pasta, the liquid is usually eggs. Wheat flour is the main ingredient and its quality, freshness, texture, and amount and type of gluten is critical. The better the flour, the better the pasta, and in this chapter I’ll explain which to choose and why as well as what type of water is best, and how to choose eggs.

In Northern Italy, fresh pasta dough is usually made from very finely ground soft, or winter, wheat, a variety of Triticum aestivum, which grows better in damp climates. This soft flour (grano tenero in Italian) is low in gluten proteins, yielding tender pasta suited to delicate sauces, its tenderness balanced by the additional protein structure provided by egg. Bread flour, another variety of Triticum aestivum, is not especially good for pasta as the type of gluten it contains is strong and elastic, perfect to contain air bubbles in bread dough but difficult to roll into thin sheets for pasta as it tends to spring back.

In Southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, pasta is often made from higher-protein durum wheat, Triticum durum, which grows well in dry climates. Commercial dry pasta is almost always made from 100 percent durum because it dries without crumbling and holds intricate shapes well. Durum wheat contains strong gluten proteins for firm texture, but because its gluten is extensible rather than elastic, pasta dough made with durum rolls out more easily.

Rye reginette—wide, flat ribbon pasta with pinked edges on both sides. This pasta shape dates from 1902 and originated in Naples, where it was created to celebrate the birth of Italy’s “little queen,” or reginette, Princess Mafalda. It is also known as Mafaldine.

Rolling out red pepper pasta dough

From left to right: dark rye pasta, yellow cornmeal–chipotle, whole wheat, buckwheat, pasta flour blend (unbleached all-purpose wheat flour with durum and semolina), and cocoa

China is the historical source of Asia’s ancient and highly developed noodle and dumpling traditions. It is possible that stuffed dumplings traveled from Siberia and Central Asia to China. In China’s north, soft wheat flour is more commonly used for noodles and dumpling wrappers while tender, translucent rice flour-based doughs are more common in the south especially for soup noodles, soup dumplings (wonton), and steamed dumplings (shu mai).

For many of the pastas in this book, I use a blend of flours—unbleached all-purpose flour, golden grainy durum semolina, and pale yellow durum flour—for chewy yet tender texture. However, you don’t need to buy anything special as many pasta experts recommend using unbleached all-purpose flour. (All-purpose flour contains a moderate amount of protein and may be a combination of lower-protein pastry flour and higher-protein bread flour, or it may be simply milled from lower-protein soft wheat flour.) Freshly milled local artisanal flour and silky smooth Italian 00 flour yield pasta with excellent wheat flavor and supple, malleable texture. Some Italian artisan pasta makers prefer 0 flour, which is closer to unbleached all-purpose in texture and absorption qualities.

To make dough with whole wheat, buckwheat, spelt, cornmeal, rye, or other lower-protein flours, I mix them with higher protein unbleached all-purpose or Italian 00 flour. On their own, specialty flours yield mealy, crumbly dough because the rough fibers they contain tend to break gluten proteins. I avoid durum here because, combined with dark flours, it makes for an odd-colored dough, especially if the liquid is egg.

For doughs containing vegetable purées such as spinach, winter squash, or roasted red peppers, I often use durum flour to increase protein content and because its nutty flavor and golden color pairs well with vegetables. Other ingredients, including dried porcini mushrooms, chestnut flour, and saffron threads, call for their own combinations of flour and liquid: whole eggs, egg yolks, egg whites, water, or wine.

Once you learn to make the Basic Egg Pasta Dough and get a feel for how it constantly evolves as it rests, as it’s rolled out, and as it dries, you can expand your repertoire to making flavored doughs. Try inky-black squid ink pasta perfect for cappellini and seafood-based liquidy sauces, chestnut flour and white wine dough used for the decorative stamped pasta coins from Genoa called corzetti, and smooth, chewy Umbrian red wine pasta that complements the region’s hearty wild game, mushrooms, and truffles.

Selecting Ingredients

If you’re going to take the time and effort to make your own pasta, start with the best ingredients, especially the most important ones: water, eggs, and flour. Luckily, even top-quality eggs and flour are relatively inexpensive and easy to find, while mineral-ri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: The Basics
• Part II: The Pasta
• Glossary
• Resources
• About the Author and Photographer
• Index
• Dedication
• Copyright