The Beginners Guide to Making Fresh Pasta

26 Saturday May 2012

I have had requests to give any beginners a step by step guide on how to make fresh pasta as effortlessly as I am able to do.

A question that I am often asked is – is fresh pasta that good that it is worth the effort of making it – and the answer is yes indeed it is. The taste and texture of home made pasta is superior to any manufactured pasta.

Not only that, there are several different recipes of types of pasta for you to choose from as well as the opportunity for you to add flavourings to the pasta as you make it. Rich Egg Pasta which is made with just egg yolks, flour and a pinch of salt. Whole Egg Pasta, which is more like the fresh pasta that one can buy in the supermarket but a much better texture and taste when you make it yourself. Both of the above can be varied by the addition of dry flavourings. Cocoa powder is particularly successful for chocolate pasta to go with rich game sauces. Ground dried mushrooms work well too.

And then there is one which is made with flour and whole egg, with the addition of oil and liquid. The liquid giving you the opportunity to vary the flavour and colour of the pasta with non dry flavourings, so it can be wine, or squid ink for black fish flavoured pasta, a strong prawn stock for a pink fish pasta, fruit juice concentrates give other interesting flavours and colours. The variations are as great as your imagination allows. And this is before we get to considering all the shapes and thicknesses that the pasta can have – Ravioli, Linguine, Tagliatelle, Lasagne, Lasagnete, Canneloni……….

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, back to the beginning.

Firstly you need to invest in a pasta machine, or dig that gifted one out of the back of the cupboard where it has been left for far too long. There are a huge range available on the internet at a huge range of prices. For a beginner it is best to go for a simple machine that is turned by hand. The speed of the electric ones is a bit too fast for the inexperienced, and really you only need an electric machine if you are regularly making pasta for more than six people. Amongst the hand operated ones, it is useful to have one that has rollers for cutting linguine and tagliatelle, but other than that they are all pretty similar. With the more expensive ones, in my opinion, you are paying the extra money for the brand name and the paint job. My machine which I am very happy with came from Ikea.

A small food processor is a useful although not essential piece of equipment when making pasta, especially if time is short.

The flour. For successful pasta making, a strong flour is required so that you have an elastic dough. If you can get the Italian 00 strong pasta flour, this is the ideal, as not only is it a strong flour to give elasticity, it is very finely ground, so it gives a fine texture that can be rolled very thin. White bread flour would be my second choice. For those of you itching to make wholemeal pasta, the bran in the flour reduces the elasticity and makes the dough more crumbly, so get the hang of making pasta with white flour first and then you can progress onto wholemeal. Standard plain white flour will make pasta, but will need more delicate handling, so to be avoided for the begginer.

Space. As you roll the pasta it will become long strips the width of the pasta machine, so you need a floured surface on which to put these while you are rolling the other strips. So make sure that you have a clear clean space on your work surface or table before you start rolling.

Time. Try out making pasta for the first time when you have an hour or so to dedicate to the operation. Once you get proficient, then you will be able to spend five minutes making the dough, and then a further 10 minutes rolling it out, but to begin with minimise the stress by giving yourself time without distractions to dedicate to the learning of a new skill.

RICH EGG LASAGNETTE

I recommend that for easy handling, that you make the amount for 2 people the first time that you try this.

Per person for a main course, halve the amount for a starter sized portion.

20 gms 00 pasta flour

1 large egg yolk

pinch of salt

If you are using a mini food processor simply put all the ingredients in it and process to a dough. If the dough is very stiff and dry and is not holding together, add a teaspoon of the egg white and pulse. If the dough is still very dry you may have to repeat this operation. The reason that the dough is sometimes the wrong texture is that different flours absorb different amounts of liquid, and of course there is slight variation in the size of a large egg yolk.

If you are mixing the dough by hand, mix the flour and salt, and pour in a heap on a board. Make a well in the centre and drop in the egg yolk. Slowly knead the flour and egg together until you have a firm dough. If the dough is very dry and doesn’t hold together, add egg white as above.

The dough at this stage can be floured and wrapped in cling film and then left to rest in the fridge until needed.

To roll the dough. Firmly attach the pasta machine to the work surface or a table. Flour the worktop around the machine. Make sure that the rollers are on the setting with the widest gap between them. Flour the dough and roll through the rollers turning the handle as you go. You will end up with a long oval of dough. Fold into 3 lengthways, turn 90 degrees and roll again.

Keep repeating this rolling and folding until the pasta is paler and silkier. With this type of pasta it is between 8 and 10 rollings. If the pasta starts to get crumbly and breaks up a bit, stop the folding and rolling and move on to the next stage.

Move the setting of the distance between the rollers one number closer. Roll the dough, lightly dust with flour. Then move one more number and roll again, lightly dust with flour again. Keep moving one setting at a time until the dough is quite thin, number 7 or 8 on my machine. As the strip of pasta gets longer, do cut it into more manageable lengths.

Lasagnette is pasta strips narrower than the lasagna sheets and wider than papardelle, so is easily cut by hand. I cut my wide pasta strips that have come out of the machine into three. The length can be whatever you find manageable, around 20 cms is about it. Do not worry about squaring off any rounded bits at the end of your strips, they will not be noticed when the dish is finished and it is a waste of a good little bit of pasta.

While you are preparing the sauce for the pasta and waiting for the water in which you are going to cook the pasta to come to the boil, you can leave the strips on the floured worktop. If they start to dry out a bit, it doesn’t matter, they will cook up the same. You only need to cover the pasta if you have flies lurking around, in which case just gently lay clean tea towels over it.

For cooking the pasta you need plenty of water that has a little salt and oil added to it. The reason for having a lot of water is so that when the pasta has been added the volume of water will not lose so much heat as a smaller amount and will therefore come back to the boil fairly quickly.

I like to use a pasta pan, which is a tall pan with a steamer type pan with holes in it that fits inside. As the inner pan doesn’t reach the bottom of the outer pan it means that there is always an extra well of water below it, which helps retain the heat and stops the pasta sinking to the hot base of the pan just about the heat and sticking to it. Also when it comes to serving, you do not have to dash across to the sink to drain your pasta, you merely slowly lift out the inner pan sitting it at an angle so that the water drains back into the lower pan. So that when you are ready the pasta is drained and next to the pan with the sauce for transferring to it. So a pasta pan is helpful but not essential.

Lasagnete with Salmon and Prawns

Fresh pasta cooks in only 3-6 minutes depending on the thickness of it, and dries and sticks to itself fairly quickly once it has been drained from its cooking liquid, so always prepare the sauce before putting the pasta in the pan to cook. There are not so many sauces that will spoil by having the heat turned off and being reheated a few minutes later once the pasta is ready to be added. You will generally find that the sauce hardly needs reheating.

A final word on the sauce to go with your pasta. Remember that the sauce wants to be more of a dressing for the pasta than an event in its own right, so restraint on the amount of sauce that you put with the pasta.

Tagliatelle with Grilled Spring Vegetables and Rabbit

Spring Salads

20 Sunday May 2012

Posted by Nevenka in Starters

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I know that salads recipes are hardly ground breaking stuff but most of us eat salad on a regular if not daily basis, so here are some ideas to perk up your salad repetoire.

Mixed leaves, goats cheese, warm bacon pieces, walnuts, chives and their flowers.

Puntarelle which is a type of endive where you eat the flower shoots which resemble asparagus, tomatoes and anchovies.

Potato salad made the way my Dad made his and taught me. New potatoes scraped and sliced, cooked al dente and then dressed while warm with lashings of extra virgen olive oil, red wine vinegar and slivers of salad onions. Chive flowers to garnish.

A classic Salade Nicoise, but made with grilled fresh tuna, why have tinned when fresh tuna is available. Mixed leaves, tomato, lightly cooked french beans, soft boiled eggs, garlic and almond mayonaise.

Gorgonzola and walnuts atop blanched mange toute peas, grilled asparagus, grilled baby courgettes and their flowers, crunchy lettuce, tomatoes. Dressed with extra virgen olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Tagliatelle with Rabbit and Grilled Spring Vegetables

15 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by Nevenka in Food for One, Main Courses

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There is something about grilling or griddling vegetables that really concentrates their flavour, and when you have the first baby vegetables ready in the spring it is the best way to maximise their special flavour. I frequently have just a plate of the mixed vegetables, but today I wanted to make a more substantial main course. For a vegetarian option substitute some mozerella, the proper made with buffalo milk, in my opinion mozerella cannot be made with anything else, for the rabbit.

Per person

20 gms 00 pasta flour

1 large egg yolk

pinch of salt

100 gms rabbit meat

olive oil

small sprig each of fresh oregano and thyme

6 cloves sweet garlic

100 ml chicken stock

Mixture of spring vegetables – a selection of the following –

baby courgettes and their flowers if you have them, green asparagus, sweet onion, baby aubergine, Florence fennel.

For the pasta – put the flour, egg yolk and salt in a small food processor and blend to a dough. Remove from the blender and with floured hands form into a ball. Wrap in cling film and put into the fridge to rest until needed later.

Peel the cloves of garlic. If some are much bigger than others, halve them so that they all cook evenly.

Cut the rabbit into small pieces.

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a small frying pan, add the garlic and fry for a couple of minutes. Add the rabbit and continue frying for another 8-10 minutes stirring from time to time.

Add the chicken stock and the herbs. Stir again to mix in all the brownings from the bottom of the pan. Simmer for 10 minutes. Season the rabbit. If the rabbit is done before the rest of the dish, then turn it off and let it continue slowly cooking in its stock until needed.

Put a pan of water on to heat up for the pasta. Add salt and a dash of olive oil to it.

Prepare the vegetables. Cut the courgettes in half lengthways, slice the onion into thick slices, slice the aubergine. The vegetables are left quite large at this point so that they are quicker to turn over during cooking. Put all the vegetables including the asparagus into a container and smear with olive oil.

Put the vegetables under the grill on a medium heat or on a griddle over a lowish heat. Cook turning every few minutes until the vegetables are browned and cooked but still have some bite. Season with salt.

While the vegetables are cooking, roll the pasta with a pasta machine in the usual way until it is pale and pliable. Then start rolling the pasta thinner until you reach no7 on most machines. Then cut into tagliatelle.

Once the water is boiling, add the pasta and cook for 3-4 minutes until cooked al dente. Drain.

Reheat the rabbit if needed and add the pasta. Remove the vegetables from the grill or griddle and cut into bite sized pieces. Add to the pasta and rabbit and mix well.

If you are making the vegetarian version of this dish, once you have grilled the vegetables and cut them up, then cooked the pasta and drained it, mix the two. Then add mozerella ripped into small pieces, mix in and serve.

Fish Chowder

13 Sunday May 2012

Posted by Nevenka in Food for One, Main Courses, Starters

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Tags

Chowder, Marrajo

The garden is so bursting with gorgeous vegetables that it is hard to decide what to cook with first. The potatoes that were planted in January are now all ready, and as there is little that is better than a freshly dug new organic potato, I think that they will have to be included in lunch. Yesterday we had them simply boiled with two dipping sauces. One a garlic mayonaise made with almonds in the place of the egg and the other spicy, a Mojo Picon from the Canary Islands made with picante smoked paprika, vinegar, garlic and olive oil.

But back to today. I love fish and being by the sea there is always a good selection of fresh fish. It is impossible to decide before arriving at the market exactly what will be the best fish on the day. Today I have chosen Marrajo. It is a meaty white fish, most likely from the same family as Swordfish and Shark. The skin is certainly siimilar to both of the above. There are several varieties of the above caught in the Mediterranean Sea, each of which have local names which can vary in places not really very far from one another. A fish can have one name here in the local fishing port of Garrucha, and another in Almeria City which is less than 100 km away.

So potatoes, fish, there is some home cured streaky bacon in the larder, fresh onions and some green asparagus. A creamy Fish Chowder will make a light lunch and is easy to cook for one.

FISH CHOWDER

Chowders hail from the Atlantic coast of the United States and are famously made in Maine with clams. There I am sure as many variations as there are cooks, but the elements that have to be included for it to class as a chowder are as follows. Bacon, potatoes, onions, milk or cream, fish or shellfish of some sort. You then add other vegetables depending on what you have and what is in season. Sweet corn being very american, fits extremely well. Peas, asparagus as I have included today, pumpkin or squash cut in small cubes, celeriac cut the same.

I like to use chicken stock as the main cooking liquid and then finish with a bit of cream to enrich the soup, but you can use just milk in place of the stock.

Per person

Olive oil

A quarter of an Onion – cut into dice

75 gms Streaky bacon cut into lardons

100-150 gms meaty white fish – I used a type of shark called Marrajo

100 gms potatoes – peeled and cut into dice about 1.5 cm square

150 ml approx chicken stock

6 stems of asparagus

2-3 tablespoons thick fresh cream

salt and pepper

Fresh flat leaved parsley

Blanch the potatoes. Put the cubes in a saucepan with salted water and bring to the boil. Simmer 1 minute and immediately drain.

Warm the olive oil in a shallow saucepan, add the onions and let cook slowly for a couple of minutes until translucent.

Add the bacon and fry for 7-10 minutes stirring from time to time.

Add the stock and the potatoes. Bring to a simmer and cook slowly for another 7-10 minutes until the potatoes are almost done.

Add the fish cut into cubes and the asparagus cut into bite sized pieces.

Cook slowly a few more minutes until the fish is just cooked.

Add salt and pepper and then the cream. As soon as the cream is amalgamated and warm, sprinkle over the freshly chopped parsley and serve.

Loquats or Nispero

08 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by Nevenka in Starters

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Eriobotryia japonica – Loquat in English which comes directly from the Chinese word – or Nispero Japonica in Spanish, nispero being a Japanese word meaning “wooly bunch” as the underside of the leaves have a soft white coating. It is an attractive evergreen tree with large deep green and shiny leaves, musky scented flowers and at this time of the year a profusion of golden fruits. It is also the first stone fruit to ripen after the winter, and for all these reasons it is much planted in here in southern spain. It is a native of China despite acquiring the japonica in its name, and must have spread to Japan first before slowly making its way to Europe by the late 1700’s. It grows extremely well in the warmer parts of spain especially the Alicante and Almeria provinces.

There are two varieties in my garden, Algerie an early variety that has very sweet yellow fruit which are eaten fresh – these have already all been consumed before the later variety is ready. The fruit on the later variety, Tanaka, is bigger and a bright orange colour and more tart, so is better cooked. Also all the fruit is ready at once and does not keep longer than a day or two so preserving most of it of it is essential. It can be made into a jam, although I think the delicate flavour of the fruit gets lost in the amount of sugar need to preserve it. Also, and this is going to sound contradictory, it makes a good indian style chutney with garlic, chilli, vinegar, spices and sugar. When you have a glut of fruit it is worth sacrificing the delicate flavour to use the tartness and colour in a chutney.

As you can surmise from the photo birds are rather partial to Nisperos as well as us, so the trees have to be netted before the fruits start to turn yellow,although I have had less of a problem with birds this year as there are currently two cats and two kittens in the household.The kittens however can pose a problem themselves…….

Most of my Nisperos get the following treatment to keep them. They are cooked, peeled and stoned and then frozen in portions with their juice. They can then be defrosted as needed to use in desserts and sauces or just eaten as they are. They are full of vitamins but little sugar so one can feel free to eat a lot of them. One of my favourite recipes in the summer is Nispero Gazpacho which follows, but firstly how to deal with the fruit.

When you pick the fruit, cut the stems rather than break off the fruit as any wound to the fruit will discolour quite quickly. Wash the fruit.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil and then gently put in the Nispero a few at a time. If you have a lot of Nipero cook them in batches so that they come back to the boil fairly rapidly. Bring back to the boil and simmer for five minutes to cook them through to their cores. If they are very large cook an extra minute to be on the safe side.

Take the fruit out of the water and put into plenty of cold water to cool them down rapidly and stop them continuing to cook.

When cool enough, peel them, cut in halves and remove the stems, stones and the inner membrane. They are then ready to use or freeze.

Nispero Gazpacho

per person

half a clove of garlic

pinch of sea salt

10 nisperos prepared as above

1 tablespoon olive oil – good fruity extra virgen

Put the garlic and salt in a blender or food processor and blitz until chopped.

Add the nispero and olive oil and blend until you have a smooth creamy soup. Check seasonings and add more salt or oil if you think it is needed.

This soup is so refreshing on a hot summers day and can be made with other fruits. Cherries when in season work very well, there is no need to blanch them just cut them fresh into the blender. The same with water melon which when blended with olive oil turns a lovely coral colour.

If you have enjoyed reading this post then click on the “follow” button at the top or bottom of the page, enter your e-mail address and you will automatically be notified when I publish a new post. Nevenka x

Broad Bean Risotto

04 Friday May 2012

Posted by Nevenka in Main Courses, Starters

≈ 1 Comment

While I have been away on my travels the vegetable garden has been very busy and is overflowing with Mange-toute Peas, Broad Beans, Asparagus and Loquats amongst other things. I will talk about the Loquats later. Lets talk about broad beans today.

Normally I pick the beans when they are small and very tender, but of course in my absence they have matured into big beans. Still very useable, but they just need a bit more work to remove the skin from each individual bean once they have been removed from their pods.

BROAD BEAN RISOTTO

Per person-

beans – shelled and skin removed if tough – 80 gms

risotto rice – 30 gms

butter – 15 gms

onion – finely chopped – 1 tbsp

raw ham – parma, serrano, bayonne – 40 gms

light stock – 150-200 ml

white wine – 40 ml

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

If you grow your own beans then this dish is ideal if you have a mixture of small tender beans and more mature ones with floury flesh. If this is the case then prepare the beans separately.

The small tender ones just want to go into a saucepan with a little of the butter. Put them on a low heat and swirl around until they are bright green. Add a small amount of water to go half the way up the beans, cover and cook for a couple of minutes until half cooked. Remove from the pan and put to one side until later.

The large beans will need their skin removed from each individual bean, then treat in the same way as the tender ones, but cook a little longer until they are mashable. Mash them into a rough pulp with their cooking liquid. They don’t want to be a smooth puree, this is a rustic dish after all.

If you only have large beans then cook them all together as above but now divide them in two and mash half. Put them separately to one side until later.

Fry the onion in butter until transparent. Add the ham cut into small strips, stir and cook for a minute.

Add the rice and stir to coat in the butter. Cook for a minute or two for the rice to absorb the butter a little.

Pour in the wine and let it bubble away for a couple of minutes.

Add the mashed beans to the pan and then enough of the stock to cover all the contents of the pan by about a centimetre. Cover and leave to cook slowly for 5-7 minutes.

Check the pan and add more stock if necessary. Add the rest of the beans and stir them in. Season with salt and pepper.

Continue cooking until the rice and beans are done. Add more stock as the risotto cooks if you think it is needed. As you know you are aiming for a wet texture but not a soupy one, so add stock in small amounts if you are unfamiliar with the rice that you are using or are not experienced at making risottos.

Serve sprinkled with ricotta or another fresh sheeps cheese.

fincafood

~ culinary and horticultural life on a Spanish farm

Monthly Archives: May 2012