Homemade Pasta (!!!)

 (I think I may have found my calling. A whole new world of cooking options has opened up for me!)

The History:
Wikipedia makes pasta sound far more complex and mysterious than perhaps necessary:
"Pasta's origin continues to evoke speculation. While many different cultures ate some sort of noodle-like food, composed mostly of grain, the key characteristics of pasta are durum wheat semolina, with a high gluten content. Furthermore, it is made with a technique that allows the resultant dough to be highly malleable, thus resulting in the many different shapes (i.e., ziti, spaghetti, ravioli) that characterize 'pasta.' ... Historians have noted several lexical milestones relevant to pasta, none which change these basic characteristics."

Lexical milestones? Um, ok. Moving on. 

The Process:
Nathan and I anticipated this weekend's activities and ordered this pasta maker from Amazon.com. Pasta recipes abound on the internet, so I had a general idea of how to combine my flour and eggs (from free range, organically fed chickens). Saturday night, we cleared the kitchen counters, poured glasses of wine, and dug in.

I have to say, this is probably the single most fun and satisfying food item I have ever made. Yes- those are strong words. But making pasta is like... well, grown-up Play-doh. But unlike the strange vaguely salty/chemical taste of Play-doh, pasta is mouthwateringly delicious! Making pasta is totally satisfying, allowing one to zone out, knead firm lumps of dough, and roll lengths of dough through a (really fun!) machine, then cut (with gratifying precision) linguini or spaghetti noodles.

Saturday night Nathan and I made about 6 servings of egg linguini and spaghetti noodles, and ate nearly all of it for dinner. Sunday morning I woke up, guiltily glanced at my pile of reading, and headed into the kitchen where I may or may not have made pasta for 5 hours straight. I used up a dozen eggs, countless cups of flour, and experimented with multiple flavors. I think I may be on the way to perfecting my technique. I definitely have a new hobby. (Anyone in New Haven- let me know if you'd like some homemade pasta. It's taken over our house.)

The Recipe:
Pasta and I get along really well, in part because the recipe is so open ended! Add about 1 cup of flour to a bowl, toss in one egg, maybe some salt, and a small kersplash of olive oil, and mix. (Want more pasta? Add one egg per cup of flour.) Add a tiny splash of water if needed. Knead until your stress is relieved (maybe 5-8 minutes?) and set the dough aside to rest for about half an hour.

Once the dough has rested, follow the instructions on your pasta maker (supposedly you can make pasta without a machine but let's face it: the machine is the fun part!!). Basically, I took about a egg sized lump of dough, made a plump worm shape, and started running it through the machine, starting at the widest setting and working my way down to the skinniest setting, finally running the lasagne-shaped giant noodle through the spaghetti cutter (see the picture above.) The key, I discovered, is to flour the dough liberally all the way through the process so that the noodles don't stick to each other or to the machine. It took about 5 sets of spaghetti to really get the hang of it- luckily, flour and eggs are inexpensive so you can afford to experiment a little until you get the technique right.

(After our first few batches of 5 foot long linguini (seriously!) we started making more moderate 16" long linguini. But hey- go to town! If long noodles appeal to you, go for it!)

Advanced Pasta Recipe: I got bored fast with the egg dough. It's delicious, for sure, but why stick with egg when you can add flavor! color! texture! I played around all day and found three flavor combinations that provide ample excitement to our pasta:

1. Whole wheat-flax seed: about 2/3 c white flour, 1/3 c whole wheat flour, 1-2 T roughly ground flax seeds, with about 1.5 eggs. This was delicious, chewy, hearty and addictive.
2. Tomato-5 pepper: 1 c flour (a little of this was whole wheat), 1 big tablespoon tomato paste, and a proprietary mixture of spices (a sampling of the many dried peppers we have around the kitchen), plus an egg.
3. Spinach-basil: 1 c flour (a little whole wheat),
1/2 c spinach, 1 egg, sprinkling dried basil. I used the Trader Joe's frozen spinach because it comes pretty finely chopped. This dough was more moist, so I added more flour as I went, and had to knead it a lot more to mix in the spinach.

The Results: I made SO. MUCH. PASTA. Our house is covered in flour and pasta is hanging from every available chair/clothesline. We ate pasta for dinner last night, and pasta for lunch (see below) and are having a friend over for pasta for dinner. It's amazing. Seriously. I can't wait for next weekend to make more pasta!


As a side note, I have to mention my absolute favorite sauce: one large can (28 oz.) tomatoes (diced/whole), one half onion, garlic cloves (optional) and (this is the important part) 2-4 T butter. Put all this in a pot, and simmer for about an hour. When you can't handle the tantalizing scent any more, puree (if you are like me and don't like lumpy tomatoes) and pile in great heaping spoonfuls on top of noodles. Apply parmesan cheese liberally.

Happy eating!

Brazil Edition Follow Up!

Well, I'm back! And, as promised, here is a brief pictorial report of the cuisine I sampled in Brazil.

To begin-if you think the picture above looks like any old grocery store aisle, you're wrong. This photo was taken in one of the biggest grocery stores I've ever been in (some employees wore roller skates to get around faster), and this aisle, both sides, was the yogurt drinks aisle. Not yogurt tubs, squeezables, drinks, and single serve cups, just drinks. It was mind boggling. (I dislike yogurt so I didn't buy any, but was astounded at the selection so I had to snap a picture.)

As promised, I tried the Brazilian national dish,  feijoada. This dish is a stew made of assorted animals and animal parts, beans, cilantro, and mysterious lumps, served atop rice. Kyle (my traveling buddy) is fluent in Portuguese, and asked the waiter what was in the feijoada. The response was a longish list of animal bits, including tripe. Kyle translated the list back to me, but left the English word for tripe off the list. (Don't worry, I heard it.) I scooped a selection of lumps out of the sauce- beef (I think), pork sausage (I think), but no tripe (which is wobbly and slightly hairy.) The taste was wonderful- spicy and tomatoey and zesty and rich, but a few bites were enough. I would not make this at home, but I did like the homemade hot sauce that came with it and hope to make my homemade hot sauce sometime this week.

Caipirinhas! (Cai-purr-een-yah) The picture above isn't a caipirinha, but rather, homemade cachaca, which is the sugar cane alcohol that is part of a caipirinha. Several bars sold cachaca that was infused with local flavors: vanilla, corn, ginger, cloves, and you could buy a 'dose' (shot) of the alcohol to sip at. I really, really loved the caipirinhas, which were available at every restaurant for affordable prices and were sweet (sugar) and tangy (lime) and simple and refreshing. I have a bottle of plain cachaca and plan to make homemade caipirinhas as the weather warms up, and I brought back some homemade cachaca from "O Cravinho" Bar in Salvador, Brazil that's infused with clove, lime, honey, and ginger -Yum!!

We spent a lot of time on the beaches at Itacare for my third week, surfing, watching the waves, and not doing anything remotely related to school. The beaches were wonderful- clean, white sand, clear water, and a plethora of vendors selling everything from water, coconuts, sarongs and jewelry to coconut cupcakes, beer, fried pastry, and grilled cheese! The cheese is a local cow's milk cheese and looks a lot like feta, but is chewier. It's skewered on a stick, and the vendors (I really liked the vendor in the picture- he was friendly and gave me a thumbs up every time I saw him) grill the skewer over a tiny handmade coal stove that they carry around the hot beach all day. The cheese somehow doesn't drip off or melt, it just turns brown and crispy on the outside and chewy and flavorful on the inside. At the end, the cheese-vendor dips the skewer into a bag of dried oregano and then grills the cheese one last minute. It's a surprisingly satisfying snack!

Finally, one other food item I promised to try was a Coxinha. These were everywhere, sold in small shops, bakeries, and some restaurants. Some were the size of a quarter, but most were about the size of a tennis ball. I finally tried one on the last days of the trip. We were in Salvador, and it was a very hot afternoon, so I washed my coxinha down with a cold beer. (The beer was terrible, by the way.) The coxinha was served hot and freshly baked/fried (I'm unsure, it tasted lightly fried.) It was intimidating to tackle: it's bigger than it looks in the picture, and appeared to be a large, teardrop shaped lump of fried yucca flour. But I was committed, so I bit into it. The outermost layer was crisp and flavorful, but the inner layer of the dough was more mushy in texture (it's yucca flour, I guess that's how it tastes?). However, the filling, a mixture of chicken, herbs, and catupirhy cheese (like a strongly flavored cream cheese?) was delicious. It made for a very filling snack. Would I make it at home? No. However, I think this is the sort of product that Trader Joe's should sell in it's frozen appetizer section, and think it would do well sold alongside the spanikopita, cheese and onion tarts, and mini spring rolls. If I were a Brazilian watching the Super Bowl, I'd eat a lot of coxinhas.

In general, Brazil's food was good, if not always mind blowing. The main thing that I ate daily and thoroughly enjoyed (besides the caipirinhas and the coconuts) was something called 'acai na tigela', which, unfortunately, I don't have a picture of. Acai is quickly becoming the new 'trendy' fruit in higher-end American grocery stores, but in Brazil it's a regular breakfast item- the purple acai fruit (it comes from a type of palm tree) is blended with sugar and ice, the put in a bowl and topped with sliced bananas and granola. It is one of the most refreshing and delicious breakfasts that I can imagine. However, while in Brazil a large bowl of this concoction would cost about $2.50-$3, in the states an equivalent amount of acai would likely cost well over $25. Unfortunate, because it is wonderful!

As mentioned earlier, our new pasta maker came right before I left, and we have a big date night planned for Saturday at which we'll be making our first batch of pasta! I'll be sure to blog about that, as well as the hot sauce that I'm excited to make! Cheers!