Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to "Basics With Babish."
Pasta...
*Laughs*
Hey what's up guys? Welcome back to "Basics With Babish"
where this week, we're taking a look at pasta.
One of the most beautiful and elegant dishes that you can create in your
kitchen with little more than a table and a rolling pin.
We're gonna take a look at a few ways to roll out and shape your pasta
and a few sauces to flavour them with.
Now, let's get down to basics.
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OK, so we're gonna start off by making pasta entirely by hand. No machines involved
Grandma-style, fork and egg; the whole deal.
We're not going to measure anything either. This is something by feel
I'm gonna start by making a mound of flour on my countertop, then I'm going to make a well in that I can crack 2 eggs inside
2 to 3 eggs, depending on how much pasta you wanna make.
And a little drizzle of olive oil, optionally and a little bit of salt. Then grab your fork and get to beatin' those eggs like you're making a Sunday omelet
We wanna be picking up little bits of flour every time and with every stroke of the fork
Dumping little bits more in there as necessary. Once it starts to get too sticky to beat with a fork,
grab a bench scraper and start folding everything towards the center.
You can do this with your hands but it's a much more messy operation.
Once a shaggy dough starts to form, we're gonna start kneading by hand for a solid 10 minutes.
I hope it was a light day at the gym because you're going to get a little bit of an upper-body workout.
We're talking 10 minutes of pressing this guy into the countertop
And you can see that there's a bunch of leftover flour; that's totally OK
We're trying to incorporate enough flour so we get a dough that's about the consistency of Play-Doh.
We want it tacky but not sticky. Smooth, supple, elastic.
This is a great recipe to start learning how to not follow a recipe and do things by look and feel, smell and touch, and feel and touch are really the same thing.
So, anyway, we'll be wrapping this guy in plastic wrap and letting it sit at room temperature for at least 30 minutes
We want to let the gluten relax a bit before we start rolling it out.
In the meantime, I'm gonna make another kind of pasta dough, a semolina pasta that is gonna be half all-purpose flour and half semolina flour.
This is gonna result in a slightly different flavor, color and texture and is yet another example of how you're gonna put your own spin on this recipe.
Just as before, we're dumping the flour out on a worktop, making a little mound, making a crater in the center, dumping our eggs in, and then adding a little bit of olive oil
And while we're starting the dough the same way, we're finish it, this time, just for fun, in a pasta machine
Gotta make sure we're covering as many techniques as possible
But, this doesn't get us out of kneading duty, so same deal as before: we're beating our egg with a fork until it can't be forked no more.
Using our bench scraper to scrape everything into the center and kneading it rigorously for ten minutes
Get creative, throw an elbow drop in there, and cease the kneading once the dough has become smooth and elastic
Wrap in plastic wrap. You'll notice that I'm trying to get as little air in there as possible
Air in this situation's gonna ruin your pasta dough
All right, while that guy's resting for 30 minutes, let's get down to the old school by-hand pasta dough
The first thing we're going to do is liberally flour everything;
The pasta, your hands, the work surface, your rolling pin, your hair, your shoes, your dog, your cat, your goldfish
Then, for a relatively small piece of dough like this one, we're gonna cut it in half.
If it's a little bit bigger, (if you used 4 or 5 eggs), cut it into quarters.
And now it's time to start gently rolling it out. We're gonna start by doing what we would do if we were using a pasta machine:
Which is laminating the dough a little bit: rolling it out, folding it into thirds, turning it 90 degrees, rolling it out again,
folding it into thirds, maybe 3 times total before we start going for the big roll; that is, rolling it out until it's nice and thin
and thin enough that you can almost see your hand through it
There's also advantages to different kinds of rolling pins: the dowel style I was using before is great for getting a nice even roll
but a French rolling style like this that's tapered at each end kind of helps you get a more even shape because when it starts getting deformed,
You can use the center of the rolling pin to roll certain parts harder than others
so you can make it, at least, closer to a rectangle
Once we've got the dough rolled out to our desired thickness and size, it's time to cut
I'm gonna start by cutting off the rough edges to give me a nice, even rectangle.
From here you could make lasagna noodles or filled pasta like ravioli or tortellini,
but I'm gonna go simple today:
By loosely rolling up the dough and cutting it into nice, wide fettuccine.
Get a little sawing action in there with your knife 'cause you don't wanna press straight down
If you find that once you're done cutting your noodles aren't unfurling properly,
just dust the dough sheet with a bit more flour before rolling it up
Now we're gonna unfurl all of our noodles to make sure none of them stuck together
but I'm gonna go simple today:
just dust the dough sheet with a bit more flour before rolling it up
Fettuccine made entirely by hand. Hang to dry or place under plastic wrap until ready to use.
Now it's time to get crankin', so to speak, with our pasta maker.
Start similarly by dusting half of the dough with flour, and laminating at least once before running it through the machine.
Then with the pasta machine on its widest setting, it's time to start running it through.
This machine's widest setting is 7, so I wanna get it down to about a two or three
that means running through four to five times.
Now it's going to start getting pretty long halfway through the rolling process
so i recommend cutting it into two pieces
and starting to work with those individually.
And you can see on the thinnest setting that I wanna put it through, I think this is a two,
it is thin and beautiful. Just like the stuff we rolled out by hand but we have an advantage here
it is a bit more uniform than what we can do with a rolling pin so it makes it better for a ravioli
or for filled pastas where you'll need very exact dimensions.
But as you can see, this pasta machine, like most others, comes with a cutting attachment.
So, we are going to use this to make some good ol' fashioned linguine.
Now, just like when cutting by hand, you want to make sure to dust your dough with flour before running it through the blades
otherwise you're going to end up pulling pasta out of the cutter and then when you try to toss your noodles with flour
they get stuck together, you end up with a bird's nest, and you consider giving up cooking entirely.
But, this was an actual mistake I made, I didn't do it for demonstration.
I wanted you guys to see that mistakes are learning experiences.
So this sheet I dusted with extra flour, and guess what? Came out perfect.
Nothing stuck together and I decided to keep making the show.
Just like the hand-cut stuff, we're tossing this with flour, sort of forming into a nest,
and then keeping on a baking sheet under plastic wrap until we're ready to use it.
You can also put these in a Ziplock bag and freeze them and then you'll have fresh pasta at the ready whenever you want it.
And now it's time to finally cook the stuff. Fresh pasta cooks very quickly,
so place into salted boiling water for probably no more than 90 seconds
The best way to tell when it's done? Taste it. None of this throwing-it-against-the-wall crap. That doesn't work.
It has always baffled me that that's a trick for testing the doneness of pasta. Just put it in your mouth!
So we're going to be treating our two different kinds of pasta two different ways today.
Let's start with cacio e pepe, maybe one of my favorite pastas in the entire world.
I'm grating equal parts parmesan cheese. Make sure when you're shopping for it you're buying parmigiano reggiano.
And then over here we've got some romano cheese. This is funkier, sharper, saltier than parmesan and it's going to make for a greater cacio e pepe.
Now, I'm kind of breaking the rules a little bit here; I'm using butter. True cacio e pepe should not have butter
but it's just kind of training wheels a little bit.
We're also gonna use this as an opportunity to toast a little bit of freshly ground pepper before we add our cooked pasta.
Try and time your pasta-cooking with the butter reaching a foamy stage
You want to not have this pasta hang out in the water for a second longer than it needs to.
Now we're going to add our grated cheeses, you'll notice that they're very finely grated
we don't want it to be a huge effort to make these melt.
And then I'll say, a solid half cup of the pasta water.
Pasta water is loaded with starch and it's going to help us make a more cohesive sauce.
This is honestly something you can do with almost any sauce that you're finishing pasta in.
You can always add a little bit of pasta water to thicken and toss rigorously until all the cheese is melted
and emulsified with the pasta water to create a creamy sauce.
As is the way with all food ever made, I'm going to salt and pepper this to taste
right at the end when I'm about to serve it to make sure that the seasonings are where they need to be.
Always plate up your pasta with a carving fork for extra pasta XP.
Twirl it into a little mound, we can go for a small portion here because this is very very rich.
And it wouldn't be cacio e pepe without a little bit extra pepe.
We're going to put some freshly ground pepper right on top. And there you have it, a wonderful date night pasta
made by hand.
But is it my favorite pasta in the world? No. My favorite is a classic from binging pasta aglio olio.
A pasta I'm obsessed with for it's simplicity. A pasta