Italian Cooking Class 101 (Fresh Pasta)

The ingredients

3/4 cup of flour and 1 egg per serving.  We are doing two servings each.

The eager Students with aprons and ingredients awaiting

The very cute Chef Mettio says put on you aprons and try not to make a mess. Uh Oh, doesn't he know flour always makes a mess.  Oh well, here we go.

Put the flour on clean surface and make a bowl.  Scrape a small portion aside for later if needed.  Add the eggs and scramble

Keep incorporating four until you have a non sticky ball and 

then you knead and knead adding flour when it gets sticky on your hand or the board,  Keep kneading until you have a non sticky yellow ball.  The egg yolks were almost orange in color and that's what makes the dough so yellow.

Cover with wrap to keep from drying our.  When ready to roll, put flour on the board and flatten the ball.  Roll out with this very long rolling pin.  Makes a nice weapon or baseball bat also.  Very multi-purpose.  You roll it, turn it a quarter turn and roll, turn it a quater turn and roll and on and on.  Then place the rolling pin as below and wrap the dough snuggly around the pin.  No gaps between the dough and the pin or you will get wrinkles,  Roll the dough nearly all the way around the pin and then start rolling again.  

Keep doing this until Mettio tells you it is thin enough.  Ha. Once it is thin enough, you let it dry for an hour.

If no time, as in our case, you can sprinkle semolina flour on it (its almost like a fine grain sand). Then roll the pasta into a long roll and cut however small you want your noodles to be in width.

Terry made hers very small

Mne were Tagliatelle size 

After cutting, quickly unroll the lengths and make nests by rolling handfulls of pasta around your hands.  This allows you to easily drop the nests into the boiling water.  If  you leave the noodles laying out longways, they will dry out and fall apart when you try to lift them.  

And so, here are our perfect little nests.  Mine on my side and Terry's on hers

They dressed Terry's with a butter and ham sauce (better for the smaller noodles).  No cooking required on this sauce just melt butter, add ham (pancetta) and toss with noodles.  Simple

and mine with bolognese sauce (heavier and better for the wider noodles).  Bolognese is another matter.  This one takes hours of cooking, so it was prepared already and added to my pasta.

served with a red wine and Voila we had dinner.  Both were very good.

The happy Chef and student

A fun class.  Maybe with the help of this blog I can remember how to do this when I get home. Ciao!

Oh yeah, Mettio says you can freeze the nests.  Freeze the nests individually on a baking sheet.  A layer of flour in a bag, add a nest, another layer of flour and a nest and so on.  When ready to cook, do not thaw.  Just shake off the flour and drop frozen nests into boiling water.