If you're only making a few portions, I think it might be easier to make fresh pasta with
just a rolling pin and your counter — no pasta rolling machine to get out and assemble
and clean. I'm gonna show you how I do it and then we'll make a super quick and delicious
creamy mushroom sauce for it.
You can mix your pasta dough in a bowlm but since we're gonna get the counter dirty anyway
when we roll this out, I'ma just do everything right here. A cup of flour, 120g to start
with. And one egg per portion is a good rule of thumb. I'm making two. Carve a little well
in the center of the flour pile and crack them in.
To me, the biggest reason to make my own pasta is to make egg pasta. Fresh egg pasta is a
totally different taste and texture from anything else and it's so good. Half teaspoon of Morton
kosher. I increasingly think fresh pasta comes out better if you season the dough directly,
at least little bit — rather than just relying on salty boil water.
With my fork I'll get those eggs beaten and mixed into the flour as much as possible before
I have no choice but to get in with my hands. Knead and knead and knead. It always feel
like it's never gonna come together until it does. Keep the faith. Once it is together,
but it becomes too sticky to work, I'll dust on more flour.
With pasta, you generally just knead in however much flour the dough can take. And my basic
technique is to gather up my dough, put my palm on the ball and then lean into it with
my bodyweight. Gather the dough back up into a ball and repeat. Very physically efficient
— requires hardly any strength because your weight and gravity are providing the force.
After a good 8 minutes of kneading my dough is pretty smooth and elastic, it's hardly
sticky at all anymore and it's therefore not taking much more flour. We're pretty much
done. I am using the dough as a broom of sorts to grab up any flakes of dough that are stuck
to the counter. If we don't get those off, they'll dry and then flake off and stick to
the dough later as we roll it out here, and they won't fully rehydrate then so then they'll
mess with the texture. Just use the dough to scrub the counter clean.
There we go, barely sticky. That'll be easy to roll out by hand, but you still want to
cover it with a damp towel or something and let it rest at least 15 minutes or so. It
rolls out easier after it rests a bit.
While we wait we can prep everything else. I'll peel and chop a few garlic cloves — you
can't beat the combination of garlic and mushrooms. I've got a pint of cremini mushrooms — that's
4 oz, 113g. Just about any mushroom variety would be fine. I'll trim any particularly
woody stem ends off and then slice. No need to get them paper thin. They'll shrink a lot
when they cook and I like them to have some texture.
Now we'll need a little pot of water for boiling. I'll give that a pinch of salt too just cover
my bases. Heat on high. And for the mushroom sauce I'll use my high-carbon steel pan from
the sponsor of this video, Misen. Let me thank them real quick.
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This is how my carbon steel pan arrived. I just melted off the packing wax and then you
season the pan just like cast iron. Unlike other oils, this seasoning wax that comes
with the pan actually smells good as you polymerize it into a naturally nonstick coating. Just
follow the directions. High-carbon steel holds onto that seasoning much in the way cast iron
does, but you also get the superior thermal conductivity of steel. It heats up a lot faster
and more evenly, and check out that removably rubber handle. Like medium-high heat, a good
coating of olive oil and this pan is great for mushrooms, which tend to stick to pans
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Now, this could be enough mushrooms for two portions, but I like a lot of mushrooms and
I like to cook them down a lot to concentrate their flavor. So I'ma put in another pint.
This one is pre-sliced — that's fine as long they're fresh. Hey there's some yellow
oyster mushrooms in there too.
I'll just stir continuously, at least for the early phase, until I've built some brown
crust on these and a lot of water stars to come out. Once the pan is water wet like that,
it's safe to let them go unattended for a moment while we get our pasta ready.
A big handful of flour to keep it from sticking as we roll, and roll we shall. I basically
do this the way I do pastry. Roll at little and then turn it. Roll, turn. Turning it or
even flipping it helps you make sure every surface is getting a fresh dusting of flour
and nothing is sticking. Plus turning helps you roll more evenly in all directions. You
can be much rougher with this than you are with pastry, though. Don't be delicate. Really
dig in there with the corner of the pin.
I'll pause to stir my mushrooms, and if you feel like they're getting out ahead of you,
just take the pan off the heat. Mushrooms can wait for a long time without anything
bad happening to them.
You may be wondering: Without a rolling machine, how do roll it to even thickness? How do I
know how thin to make it? Well, the good news is you don't have to worry about that, because
it's nearly impossible to get this very, very thin with a rolling pin. Just get all of it
as thin as you physically can, and everything will be pretty even and it definitely won't
be too thin. The bad news is your noodles are probably gonna be a little thick, a little
rustic. But if we play our cards right, they'll be satisfyingly thick. Thicc, with two Cs.
I'll make sure that's well-floured and not sticky before I fold it up a few times and
throw it on a cutting board. I find a sawing motion works better than straight downward
pressure. If you just push down, it tends to crush the layers together more and make
them stick to each other. I'm going for tagliatelle-type width on these, keeping in mind they're gonna
swell like 50% when they cook.
Once cut, you either need drape them over something, like a drying rack where they can
hold for awhile without sticking to each other, or you can just toss them around in a little
flour to get them unraveled and then cook them within a few minutes. Once they're in
a pile like that, you're committed and you gotta cook them soon before they stick. This
is why I got my mushrooms going in advance.
They're back on the heat now and looking cooked, so I'll throw in my garlic and let it just
barely cook for a minute before deglazing with ... fine Scotch whiskey. It might seem
weird, but I think barrel-aged spirits go amazing with mushrooms and/or cream, even
with otherwise-Italian flavors. Sometime I use brandy, sometimes I use bourbon. You could
totally deglaze with a splash of water instead — this just gives the sauce some extra depth.
Then just enough cream to just cover the mushrooms. Once that's in, the timing should work out
perfect if we drop the pasta now. Give it a stir to make sure the noodles aren't sticking
to the pan or each other. Fresh pasta cooks in like two minutes. Stir that simmering cream,
meanwhile. And give it a conservative seasoning. We can add more salt at the end to taste.
And just when the pasta seems to have swollen a bit and go noticeably more buoyant, it's
done. If anything, I want to undercook this a bit before it goes in the sauce.
And pasta water is the other main component of the sauce. You could catch some in cup
as you drain — I'm simply gonna not drain this very thoroughly and have faith the proportions
are gonna work out. There's tons of wiggle room here. Toss that around, get everything
combined.
I think it's gonna need more moisture. That sauce texture might look perfect now, but
it's gonna thicken a ton by the time it cools on the plate and we actually start eating.
I'ma loosen it with some more Scotch, but water would be fine. More cream would do it,
as long as it doesn't get cooked very much.
You could finish now with some fresh herb. Tarragon would go with these flavors. Parsley
would be nice.
But today I'm gonna do an alternative to finishing with herbs. I'm gonna dump in a really big
handful of arugula. Any delicate salad green that you have leftover in the fridge could
work — watercress, baby spinach. And it will fit in two seconds if you can just get
it worked into the pan a little. It will wilt down almost instantly.
Finishing pasta with tender greens gets you vibrant color and freshness without all the
powerful aromas of herbs. If you want to the other flavors of your dish to ring clear,
this works great. I want to taste the mushrooms and the whiskey today. Taste for salt content,
add more if needed and you're done.
Look at how much that sauce has tightened in just the last few seconds — I could have
put in even more moisture.
Because these are rough, hand-rolled noodles their texture is on the verge dumping consistency,
but I love that and it works great with the mushrooms. The whole dish is satisfyingly
toothsome. Not something you wanna eat every day, this heap of carbs and dairy fat and
booze. I'm gonna have some regrets later, but at the moment I'm a happy man.