Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Homemade Pasta

What have you been cooking and eating lately? It's been a while since I shared with you what I've been making so I thought it might be fun to share my latest adventure...

First of all, I took a pasta making class a couple weeks ago at a place in Waco called Gourmet Gallery. It's a cute little kitchen store and they also hold lots of classes where they teach you how to make things such as pasta, tamales, bread, Mediterranean food, Easter desserts...I mean it's quite the range of classes. It's amazing. The only negative thing is that it costs money to take these classes. (Shocking, I know!) And often more money than I have.

However, this class only cost $35 so Camden and I decided to take it together! We learned how to make homemade spaghetti with marinara sauce and butternut squash ravioli with brown butter sage sauce. Amazing. So we decided to try it at home.

Here I am rolling out the dough:

Here are our noodles waiting to be cooked:

And here they are after they were cooked!

Those noodles are definitely much thicker than any of the ones we made at our class, but we were working without the help of a pasta roller. They still tasted great.

Here's the recipe we used for the dough. This recipe is from our class we took and courtesy of chef Juanita Barrientos, who taught the class:
2 cups flour (we did half whole wheat and half all-purpose)
1 t. kosher salt
4 large eggs
1 T extra virgin olive oil
Cornmeal, for dusting

On a flat, clean surface make a mound of flour. Add salt and make a well in the center. Crack all the eggs inside the well, add olive oil, and scramble them with a fork until combined, gathering some flour from the walls in the process. When dough is dry enough to handle, begin to knead dough until elastic in texture. This process should take at least ten minutes - even longer with whole wheat dough! You will notice a huge change in the way the dough feels after it has been kneaded long enough. It will be so soft compared to when you started.

Next, divide the dough in half, rub each half with olive oil, wrap them with plastic, and let them rest before it's rolled out. Or don't, whatever. Then roll out the dough by hand until it's 1/8 an inch thick, if you do it the way we did. Or do it the way the chef recommended, and the way we did it in class, and use this amazing pasta roller Kitchen Aid attachment that I really really really want...(Hint hint, to those of you who sometimes buy me really expensive presents...) But anyway.

It's so good! It tasted delicious! And you can buy spaghetti sauce if you want, or you can make it! Camden and I made our own vodka cream sauce from a cookbook I have to go with it, and it was delicious. If you go to the cookbook on Amazon and click "search inside this book" and then search for vodka cream sauce, you can get that recipe too. Of course, I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, but oh well.

So that's my latest cooking accomplishment! We haven't been brave enough to try the ravioli yet, but I will eventually. And hopefully I'll even branch out further. Seriously, this stuff was good. And extremely cheap to make. That's a winner in our house every time!

Have you had any cooking adventures lately?


3 comments:

Unknown said...

DO YOU HAVE A STAND MIXER?!!! If so, I'm jealous. I've recently made an awesome deep dish pizza and coffee cake. I've been watching a lot of cake shows on food network and want to learn how to work w/ fondant...maybe i'll take a class or two over spring break

Anonymous said...

Fun! I'm so impressed!!! :)

Kristi said...

Yes I do have a stand mixer! It was a gift from my grandma for our wedding. It's amazing, I love it. And Scott - I have friends who have taken classes at Michael's with the Wilton cake decorating people and they loved it. I think the classes are really cheap!