(upbeat Music)
- Hey, I'm Ben, one of the chefs from Sorted Food.
And today, I'm gonna show you one of those basic skills
that becomes the bedrock of so many dishes.
I'm gonna show you two different variations.
You guys have been asking for it loads.
It's been searched for loads, it's homemade pasta,
and it really only involves two ingredients.
Right. I'm here with Mike.
Who's going to keep me on track and make sure I don't get
too cheffy, but why want to get across here is the fact that
as chefs, sometimes recipes are really useful.
Often it's easier just to remember the basics
and then feel free to ad lib.
So the basics to pasta is for every portion you're making
100 grammes of flour and one egg.
That's it.
So today we'll make the pasta dough
the same pasta dough,
but then we'll divide in two,
we'll do two different things with it.
One we'll roll out, cut and we'll get nice strands of pasta.
Tagliatelle or pappardelle. You choose.
The other version will be a filled pasta,
So we'll fill it with a very simple filling and show you
exactly how to make ravioli or tortellini.
First things first. Enough pasta for you and I, Mike,
so that's two people, 200 grammes of flour,
season it with salt.
200 grammes equals two eggs.
Now the brave professional chefs out there,
we'll just do this on the table. They'll make a well,
they put the eggs in the middle, start to bring it together.
Fine. You can do that.
If you're at home, this is much cleaner, much easier.
I'm also going to add in a glug of oil,
about a teaspoon per egg,
and then just bring it together into a dough.
Generally speaking, I like to mix it in the middle
and occasionally sort of just bring in a bit more.
Once it's almost together,
you can get your hands involved.
Once it starts to come together,
it kind of sticks to all those little bits in the bowl and
the bowl ends up practically clean,
and then you just need to knead it
until it's really soft and elastic.
I mean, this is already coming together nicely,
but just needs a bit of work.
Happy with that. You can give it a poke.
You can see what we mean. It's like, Play-Doh.
You want to wrap it in cling film and then let it
rest in the fridge.
Or actually even just at room temperature for half an hour.
Now, while we wait for our pasta to rest,
you want about half an hour,
but actually can be anything up to a day in the fridge.
If you want to get ahead,
we can make a filling for our filled pasta and get a large
pan of water up to a rapid boil
cause we need that later on.
The filling today is gonna be based around cream cheese.
You can add to the cream cheese,
whatever you've got in the fridge.
Today, we're going to super classic.
I've got some fresh spinach.
All I've done is wilt it
by pouring boiling water over the spinach... a few seconds,
and then squeezing out most of the moisture.
- Best to sort of wait for the water to cool a bit
before you squeeze the spinach.
- Yes squeeze with tongs, get it on some kitchen roll.
And when it's cool enough squeeze or take out the tongs and
put it into cold water. So you maybe stop the cooking.
So it stays really green.
And then it be cool enough to just squeeze.
Spinach, lemon and nutmeg,
probably only quarter of a teaspoon.
Once it's been freshly grated
with plenty of salt and pepper,
I would also say,
this is quite a lot that I've made for filled pasta,
that we're going to demonstrate today,
but it's also delicious with other pasta.
You don't have to fill it
cause if you put that into hot pasta,
like tagliatelle with some of the pasta water
to let it down,
you get an amazing creamy sauce to go around pasta.
If you can't be bothered to fill it.
- Oh, he's in his herb box.
- So the filling is done for one of our pastas for the other
one, super simple lemon, garlic, fresh herbs.
So a clove of garlic cutting two wafer thin slivers.
Remember your knife technique,
keep your fingers back and just warm
up in olive oil in a pan.
You don't really want to fry it and
make it go golden and crisp.
You're just infusing it and we'll chop the herbs. Perhaps a
bit spoiled for choice. I've got fresh oregano,
fresh basil and fresh thyme, but you use
whatever you've got.
You can chop some spinach. You could chop some rocket,
right? pasta's rested.
I'm going to take half of it and roll
it out nice and thin on a floured surface.
Not too much flour. Remember you've already
done your recipe and your ratio of a
hundred grammes to one egg.
You don't want to add too much more flour to your board,
but if it's a bit sticky, of course you'll have to.
Then you want to basically get it super thin.
Pretty much, the thinner the better
and the cutting by hand is also really easy.
You want to fold it over on itself.
So you get many layers thick and then cut it.
The risk of doing that is that all the layers stick
together.
So little sprinkling of semolina stops those layers from
sticking, but also won't make it
claggy when you later boil it.
Depending how fancy you want to be... at home... I use it all,
but these end bits, aren't going to be
straight and perfect.
So you basically cut them off,
but they are, what's I'd call, pasta scraps
they are also great to throw into soups and broths and things
just cook out and add, but now you've
got a straight edge. We can cut pasta.
If we'd done it well enough,
you should have these lovely long strands of pasta.
Now, a couple of options.
If you're making homemade pasta,
these are ready to go straight into your water,
or you can hang them over a coat hanger and dry them out.
24 hours at room temperature and you'll
have yourself dried pasta.
So that was about the hundred grammes
bout the one egg about so about
half a batter made basically sort of
like a handful of pasta is a good
generous portion. And then you just want to
lower it into rapidly boiling,
heavily salted water.
You want to try and bring it back to boil as soon as it can
so that you've got your oil and your garlic
squeezing lemon juice loads of those
fresh herbs we cut up. Fresh pasta,
no time at all. You want it 'al dente'
which actually means to the tooth,
a slight bite basically when it's all
floating and then just
like gorgeous and fused lemon and
garlic and herb oil with a
tablespoon or two of that hot, starchy, pasta water.
- So the starchy pasta water,
basically just thickens it up a bit.
- It emulsifies it, it thickens.
It it's almost like the glue,
but it's also put the seasoning 'cause
that was seasoned water.
- Ahh
- And I hope it really is easy to follow
a hundred grammes of pasta flour, one
egg pinch of salt, a little bit of olive oil
Knead it until it's like play- doh
rest it, roll it, cut it, boil it.
Yummy. Easy right?
And you can cut the pasta into thinner strands,
fatter sheets, and you can mix in
any herbs or flavours
you like. A little kick of chili is really nice too.
However, same dough can also be
used for filled pasta. Exactly the same.
You're going to want a floured surface,
not floured too much.
Roll out as thin as you can.
And I really mean thin this time because to fill a pasta,
you need pasta on both sides of your filling.
So it's going to end up double thickness.
And for this one. I'm going even longer
and thinner because if we're going to
fill it, then you got two options.
You either roll two sheets,
put your filling on one and put the
other sheet on top or what I find a lot
easier to just roll one,
put the thing on one age and just flop it over.
So I'm going for the flop technique.
Teaspoon blobs.
Oh no.
- What?
- I started at the top off for that
and I've ended up at the bottom
Look at that! What a mess.
So top tip for everyone at home,
you want to put your filling just above the centre line or
just below the centre line, not half
and half.
Right. Water acts as glue.
Fold it over.
what you want to do is use the cups of your hand,
just to kind of seal in around that filling.
If you got one of these, you're probably quite fancy.
If you've got one of these probably means
you eat pizza more often.
If not, you probably got one of these.
Any of those work,
what you want to do is cut either side of it.
Exactly the same as the other pasta
into rapidly boiling heavily salted water.
About two minutes until they float.
Just a little bit of sauce for base the plate.
There's 101 ways to make filled and shaped pasta.
This is pretty much a foolproof, fail-safe way.
You can mix up the flavours.
Obviously. You can mix up the shapes.
Obviously. You can put in more filling, less filling
You do you.
There you go, it looks quite fancy,
but let's be honest. Same easy pasta
may be an extra step when it comes to doing the
filling rather than just.
cutting the pasta. If I was at home...
I'd bung the other three on!
But there we go.
I appreciate you're not going to make
homemade pasta at home all the time. I don't.
But when you do it is exceptional.
Whether you toss it through things,
fill it with things you guys can create. I said,
this was just the foundation and the basis.
So, you know, we liked to talk and share ideas,
comment down below.
What do you like to serve with your pasta in it,
on it in between it,
you tell us and as ever joined the conversation over on
Twitter.
So this pretty much wraps up our September skills mini
series. Tell us what you thought.
Did you enjoy it? Did you use a skill?
Did you like a skill?
Don't forget head over to sorted.club where there's loads of
other blogs and skills you can pick up.
And if enough of you give this video like,
we'll know to make some more.
Can we eat pasta now?
- Oh yes, please.
Oh my goodness. That is fantastic.
- Garlicky, Herby.
- Mmm. But lemony.
- Mhmm.
- Oh, I've got to try that.