As the years went by and I could afford better things, I eventually took the step up to what I thought of as the "fresh" pasta in the grocery store. You know the stuff. It's in the refrigerator section, usually near the cream cheese, eggs, or something like that, and I believe Buitoni pretty much has the corner on the market. And sure enough, I started cooking with that more frequently and thought it was much better than the dried stuff. I even began to look down at the dried stuff -- the cheap alternative to real pasta.
And then last year, I learned how to actually make my own pasta dough. This was taught to me at one of Southern Season's cooking classes. For those of you who aren't in Chapel Hill, Southern Season is perhaps the greatest store of all time. It's almost indescribable in all of its glory, but above the store, they actually have a little cooking school area where they hold classes. This particular class was about making your own pasta and pizza dough and let me tell you, it was mind blowing. Why? Because there is really almost nothing simpler than making the dough! Why have I been buying this stuff in the store all these years?! All I need is oil, eggs, and flour!
So it was a great surprise this year when for Christmas, I got a pasta roller. You see, as great as it was to know how to make the pasta dough, without a roller, you can't really do much with it. I tried the roller out a couple of weeks ago and found it to be relatively easy to use and so I decided last night to make another Tyler Florence recipe (I'm almost through his cookbook, so don't worry, I'll be moving on soon): a pancetta carbonara.
The first step was to make the pasta dough because it needs to rest before being rolled. Here is a basic recipe for pasta dough:
First, take two cups of flour, mix in a teaspoon of salt, and make a well in your mixture:
Into your well, add three eggs and a tablespoon of olive oil and gently mix that together inside the well:
Now comes the fun part. With a fork, slowly mix flour from your well into the egg mixture. While you do this, you are going to want to use one of your hands to shore up the wall of your well as it can start to crumble. If it crumbles, you'll have a lava flow of egg going down the mountain, which can be rather messy. Here's a picture of how I was doing about half way through. You can see on the left a spot where some egg made a run for it:
After a few minutes, all the flour should get incorporated and you'll have a ball forming:
You then knead that for 10 minutes or so and you'll create a perfect pasta ball. Here is mine, which is now wrapped in plastic to prevent it from getting dry while it rests for the next 30 minutes or so:
Unfortunately, the rest of the cooking took place quickly so I can't provide pictures, but I'll start with the pasta and move to the carbonara.
Once the dough had rested, I unwrapped it and cut it in two balls to make it easier to work with. I then dusted it with a little flour and began the process of rolling it through the pasta maker. To do this, you start it on the widest setting, roll it through, fold it in half, and continue for about 6 passes. Next, you set the pasta roller to one setting narrower and repeat the process. Eventually, you'll have a really thin sheet of pasta dough, which you can then feed through an accessory to cut it into shape.
Now, I have to admit, last night's pasta didn't turn out quite right. The problem is that I was rolling the sheets too long so that they were breaking on me. This caused me to have to start over at one point -- and I was getting hungry. I decided I would try to save time by not getting the pasta to its thinnest setting and feed it through the cutter at about the half way point. This was a mistake. It ended up clogging the cutter, which meant that the pasta I fed through was clumped together. I decided I was okay with this as I was too hungry to start over again, but in the picture you see below, you'll see some pasta is stuck together in a giant clump whereas some of it looks perfect (the perfect pasta being the next bit I made and actually rolled out all the way). In any event, once the pasta was rolled and cut, it only takes about 2-3 minutes to cook in boiling water.
For the carbonara, I mixed a cup of heavy cream, a cup of milk, and six eggs together. I put that into a double boiler that was already warmed up. I then used an immersion blender for about 8 minutes on this mixture while it cooked. It thickens up a bit and becomes very foamy. Once it's thick and foamy, I stirred in one half cup of parmigiana cheese.
Meanwhile, I had cut up one third pound of pancetta into strips and put that in a heated pan with some olive oil. After a few minutes of cooking the pancetta, I added 7 garlic gloves, which were thinly sliced, and cooked those in the pan with the pancetta. This all took about 10 minutes before the pancetta was nice and crisp and the garlic cooked.
To put it all together, I put the pasta in a bowl, poured some carbonara sauce over it, and then topped it with the pancetta and garlic. The final product looked like this:
I have to say, despite a few large clumps of pasta, this was really delicious. For one, fresh pasta tastes so wonderful compared to anything you get at the grocery store. I have now learned an important lesson with my pasta roller and so I look forward to using it again soon to try again. The carbonara sauce was very light and creamy, which I enjoyed. And with a pancetta topping, how could things really be that wrong?
