Thursday, September 23 2010

Pasta Perfect, Future Tense

Who doesn't love noodles? Crazy people, that's who.

Pasta is the food of my people. Looking at me, blond and blue-eyed and rather strapping, it's obvious that I enjoy pasta on a regular basis, but I assuredly don't look very Italian in the classical sense. This is because no matter what they say, Italians don't have a monopoly on good pasta. Every culture that has access to wheat (or rice, or beans, or buckwheat, or spelt, or anything) makes noodles of some kind.

No, my people (on my mother's side anyway) are Mennonites. It's a complex and deeply weird religious sect based on Christian Anabaptism, worthy of a bit of study if you're into cultural anthropology (and who isn't?) but if you don't have time to do research, it helps to think of them as part of the 'plain people'--think Amish, but not so telegenic. While I'm not religiously observant, I find quite a bit to admire about Mennonites and their funny little ways, from being peaceniks to their views on disaster response, and their ability to enjoy themselves and laugh loud and long at life, despite looking a bit dour to outsiders.

Sure I may be a little bit prejudiced there, but in addition to these traits I find their love of noodles to be the closest bond I have with my forbears. The traditional Mennonite noodles are called kielke (pronounced 'cheel-chya' in my house). The format is simple: flour, eggs and salt are mixed and kneaded, rolled out thin as possible, floured and then rolled up like a jelly roll and finally cut cross-wise to make a long, flat noodle. Depending on who makes them they can be boiled up in a roll, just like that (it's kind of interesting looking), unfurled to make flat noodles, or sliced very thin and then patiently pulled apart and hand-rubbed a bit to separate them. My mother and aunts favoured the latter, because it made for the best fried noodles the next day. Sauce was usually very simple: sauté bacon pieces until crisp, add onion, cook until soft, add tomato, simmer and serve sprinkled with bacon bits and maybe some good Mennonite sausage.

I'll never forget the first time I made noodles for my wife. As a Red Seal chef she can pretty much tame any cuisine, but this was one area where my 20 year-old lunkheaded self was actually a master of a foodstuff before her! Egads, I could barely believe it, but was proud of the accomplishment. Since our first encounter with the happy noodle, I've refined my technique a bit. First I got a hand-cranked pasta machine, with makes very short (and tidy!) work of the noodle rolling and cutting. Then I jumped up to a Kitchenaid^TM stand mixer with a dough hook, which took care of the kneading. That was great for a while, but then came a birthday when life just became that much better, and I got the noodlemaking attachment for the Kitchenaid.

Proof that my wife loves me and wants me to be happy

I don't want this to sound like an advertisement for the fine family of products from Kitchenaid^TM, but this is one of those kitchen appliances that suddenly transforms how you think about food preparation and how you eat on a daily basis. I can now get home from work at 7 pm and by 7:45 I'm sitting down with screamingly fresh homemade noodles that are a million times better than any prepared pasta I can buy. I can't imagine my life without my noodle maker any longer, and it's lead me to even more noodly adventures, from making a whopping supply of pesto every year to making my own sausages and salami (with a Kitchenaid^TM grinder attachment, of course!)

Equipment is only one part of my refinement. The second is ingredients. Hard wheat flour has more protein in it, and so forms more gluten, the elastic compound that makes noodles firm-yet-tender. Italian pasta makers pay serious attention to the kind and quality of wheat that goes into their pasta, so much so that Canadian hard wheat, such as Durum, is in serious demands and fetches very high prices. Over the years I've experimented with various flours and blends, but I've settled on Durum Semolina. I buy an organic brand from a health-food store. I'm sure I'm paying a ridiculous price compared to bulk costs (my cousin David who farms in Saskatchewan would probably look at the value chain where he's getting cents a bushel and where I'm paying dollars a pound and shake his head) but they pack it in vapour barrier 400 gram (a little under one pound) bags that I can pop into my freezer until needed. It's enough to make noodles for four lumberjacks or two dinners, two lunches and a fry-up breakfast for my wife and I.

Yep, it's the same stuff as for semolina pudding. Never used it for pudding, probably never will

First things first: before I haul out the machinery and the ingredients I start the sauce. In this case I made a very simple one with hot Italian sausage, onions, garlic, red peppers and tomatoes. In the time it would take me to get the noodles ready the sauce would be finished cooking down and taste great. I also pulled out some of that homemade pesto and got it thawing in a little cream. My trick of blanching the basil before using it really helps keep the colour, and slow heating keeps it from scorching or changing flavour.

Next, the hardware and software.

Mission control: Pasta minus 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

A quick note about other ingredients; the eggs are organic free rangers bought from a local supplier. Once I got used to eggs made by real chickens living in a state of nature I couldn't eat battery eggs any longer--they don't taste like anything! The salt is a bit specialised as well, as it's sea-salt with no anti-caking or flow agents in it. Again, heavily processed salt doesn't have the flavour I like, and I swear it tastes like chemicals.

I'm starting to sound weirdly high maintenance. I guess I better not reveal the fact that I have fourteen different kinds of salt on hand at any one time or I'll sound even more eccentric.

Ahem. First up, ingredients in the mixer.

Glorious orange yolks

It's a simple recipe: four hundred grams of semolina, five large eggs and teaspoon of salt. Not another blessed thing. Note that five eggs makes a fairly soft dough--indeed, it would be too soft to put through the pasta rollers right away. That's okay because we're not doing anything with it right away, and we'll be tightening it up later. The first step with the very soft dough is to build up gluten, which is done by mechanically stretching and kneading the mixture. If you have a soft, wet dough to start, your machine will have an easy time of developing scandalous amounts of gluten. When you turn it off, it should look something like this:

Ten minutes on medium-high. It looks like buttercream, but it's incredibly elastic and gooey

Because the semolina is in big grains rather than a fine flour, not all of it will have soaked up the egg liquid and the dough will be quite grainy-gritty at this point. It's time for a rest. I wrap the dough up for ten minutes to allow the rest of the semolina to swell. While I'm waiting I usually sample the wine to make sure it's okay (this can take several glasses) and tend to the sauce. This is also the point when I put on a gigantic pot of water. More on that below.

Dead? Resting? Pining for the Fjords?

After the rest it's time to refine the dough. Although it has plenty of gluten, it doesn't yet have the full structure I look for in a truly toothsome pasta. By running it through the rollers, doubling it over and running it through again--lather, rinse, repeat about a hundred times--I can build up a structure that's not only as elastic as a bungee cord, but also has a texture like silk. The first step is to turn the dough out with some flour and gauge the moisture.

Like a sculptor, I will refine this raw clay until it conforms to my vision of noodly greatness

I used to make it with four eggs, but that made for a very stiff dough that took more trips through the rollers to attain the silky texture I love so much. By starting wet I get much further along the refinement process, but I have to add a bit of flour to stiffen the dough so it doesn't stick to the rollers and can be handled. This means brushing the sheets with a little flour before folding them over for each pass through the machine.

First pass. Note the tear through the dough--still too wet

Round and round it goes, though the widest setting on the rollers as I work in the flour between each pass and get closer to the perfect texture.

It's coming along nicely

What is that perfect texture? It's kind of hard to describe. If you're a sculptor, it's what truly perfect clay feels like: utterly smooth, plastic and malleable. I sometimes liken it to French-milled soap, which doesn't convey the proper elasticity, but rather speaks to the refinement. After about ten or twelve passes the dough is firm enough that it doesn't need any more flour--it won't stick to my hands, the machine or itself. That means it's time to tighten the rollers and thin the dough out for noodle cutting.

Thin, light and very stretchy--kind  of like a political promise

Stacked up and ready to go

For tagliatelle, the noodles I was making on this night I usually use the #4 setting, but not just once: the dough likes to fight back a little, so it takes two or three passes (without folding) to get it to the proper thinness. When I make narrow noodles I either do #6 for fat, spaghetti-like noodles or #8, to make angel hair pasta. Of course, you don't actually need to use the noodle cutter if you're making lasagna noodles (they don't require pre-cooking, but rather cook right in the lasagna sauce, bless 'em). I also sometimes cut the sheets into hand-sized pieces for 'torn rags' pasta, very nice but requiring knife-and-fork work.

But the mission in this case is tagliatelle, so wide cutter was employed.

Almost there!

Once the noodles are all cut I dust them with flour and prep the pot. I use a very large canning pot and generally boil up 12 litres (three gallons) of water. The magic numbers for pasta are sometimes chanted as 'one, ten, one-hundred'. One litre of water and ten grams of salt for every 100 grams of pasta. A couple of good things: that's nearly enough water, and the right amount of salt (it's about a teaspoon and a half for every litre, or six teaspoons a gallon). But I like more water--lots more. First, it really prevents sticking, and second, with that much water you've got tremendous thermal mass. When the pasta goes in it won't drop off the boil so easily, so it will cook uniformly and rapidly.

Going to pot. Note pesto in front, sausage tomato sauce on right

Fresh pasta only takes a couple of minutes to cook. Test it like you would any pasta, bite into a noodle and check to make sure it bites back a little. Unlike extruded pasta (most of the stuff you buy dried has been squooshed out through an extrusion die rather than rolled like this) it's nearly impossible to over-cook this stuff. It has so much structure from the gluten it never, ever loses integrity and the tooth (al dente, in Italian) is superb, light years beyond even fancy-pants store-bought.

When it's ready, drain and sauce. I sometimes just dress it with a little olive oil (butter if I'm feeling nostalgic) that I've poached some garlic in, along with grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and a lot of black pepper for a pure noodle experience, but this stuff loves a good saucing.

Plate o' pasta perfection

Toss in a crunchy salad, a nice glass of wine, a little jazz on the stereo and suddenly you're in the best tagliatelle joint in town.

Hmm, all this pasta talk has left me peckish. I think I'll make some squash ravioli with ricotta and pancetta tonight.

Noodles. There's nothing they can't make better.

Posted by Tim the Noodlemaker AT 2:59PM

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