Issue #144: Fresh Start, Fresh Pasta

Reprogramming My Inner Movement Memory, Making Fresh Orecchiette

The cupboards have been painted. The knobs have been replaced. Everything in our new New Hampshire kitchen finally has a home. Which is not to say that things have been organized. Mostly, I put my loose categories of ingredients (see Issue #142) where they would fit. Legumes here. Grains over there. Spices on the other side of the stove.

The kitchen is assembled.

Certainly nothing has been Taylorized, which I am reminded every time I start to cook. Having puttered around the same kitchen for a dozen years, I’m amazed how many of my movements are embodied in physical memory. I reach this way, I turn that, without thinking because I “know” where things are. Or where they were. Now, I have to contemplate everything I need. Where’d I put it? What’s it next to? Should it be moved somewhere else? Everything takes longer.

One type of knowledge that I seem to have particularly internalized is timing. Without paying much attention, in my old kitchen I knew how long I had before the pot was filled with water, before the pancakes were ready to flip, before the smoke detector went off while I was searing meat. Here, our faucet runs much faster and my pots have overflowed. Monday morning—on Nate’s birthday!—I burned a batch of pancakes so badly I had to throw them away. I have made literally thousands of perfect pancakes (see Issue #9). And then at dinner, searing his birthday steak set off a smoke detector, which in this house, unlike in our Manhattan apartment, alerts the fire department, who were fortunately intercepted on their way.

I imagine this kind of reprogramming is very good for neuroplasticity, even if it is not good for dinner—or for local public safety services.

One way I’m hoping to jumpstart the process of learning my way around the kitchen anew is to make things I haven’t made before, or things I haven’t done often, or in a long time. Without the baggage of habit, I’m hoping to carve new neuropathways. In Tai Chi we call this approach having a “beginners mind.”

Fresh Pasta Thoughts

For some reason—maybe watching too many Pasta Grannies segments on YouTube—I’ve thought that here in New Hampshire I will make fresh pasta more regularly than I ever did in Manhattan. There’s time, space, and local flour. This has led me to buy some fancy new brass pasta tools imported from Italy, of course. Yesterday, as I looked out on the rainy hillside of our property, it seemed like the right moment to start.

I love the weight of these brass pasta tools from Italy.

I have a lot of opinions about fresh pasta, perhaps the strongest of which is that just because pasta is made fresh doesn’t mean it is better than dried. It is different. In fact, most fresh pasta you find in grocery stores here in the U.S. is poor quality, thick and pasty. You are better off with a dried pasta imported from Italy. Some dishes are better with fresh pasta, some are not.

The fresh pastas we often think of—pappardelle, fettuccine, tagliarini, tortellini, maccheroni alla guitara—generally come from the northern regions of Italy, where the pasta dough is enriched with eggs. In the south and in certain historically poorer regions of Italy, such as Tuscany—which yes, at one time, was considered a poor region—fresh pasta is made simply from flour and water.

Another belief I hold and hope to impart is that fresh pasta is quick and easy to make provided you are only doing it for two to four people. Anything more than that and it’s a production. It’s also difficult to cook and sauce fresh pasta well for a large group.

Finally, a pet peeve. People throw the Italian concept of “00” or “doppio zero” flour around without understanding what it means. The zeros refer to the fineness of the grind, not the gluten content or intended use of the flour. Thus, to say you made something with “00” flour doesn’t really mean anything. There is 00 bread flour, 00 pastry flour, and 00 pasta flour. You need to be more specific. Since I now live less than a 15-minute drive from the King Arthur Flour Baking Center in Norwich, Vermont, I’m using their all-purpose flour as the basis of my pasta making for the time being.

Little Ears

For my first of hopefully many pastas I will make in our new home, I chose orecchiette, a distinct and delicious shape from Puglia that literally translates to “little ears.” I was first taught how to make them by a woman from Puglia who had lugged her oversized pasta board to our classroom in Torino to show us how she digs into it with a knife to make a rough surface on the wood over which she shapes the dough to give it a rough surface to catch the sauce.

Later I worked for a Pugliese chef in Torino, who had a Piemontese restaurant. Occasionally for family meal, he’d make specialties from Puglia—which generally I liked better than his Piemontese dishes, to be honest. Orechiette with sausage and broccoli raab was a highlight among them.

Yesterday’s dinner. Fresh orecchiette with Italians sausage and fennel.

The nice thing about pastas like orecchiette and related ones, such as foglia di olive (olive oil leaves), cavatelli (like gnocchi), and even Tuscan pici (thin ropes), is that in addition to not requiring eggs, they do not require a pasta machine or even excessive rolling. (They also don’t require any of the fancy Italian pasta tools I bought!) This is another reason they are quick to make. For orecchiette, after kneading the dough and letting it rest, you roll out ropes of dough that you cut into small pieces and scrape over a wooden surface with the tip of a butterknife. Then you just unfurl the pasta over your thumb or finger to shape the ear. Basta così.

Obviously, it takes a little practice to get your little ears perfect. But here’s the thing. Qhen it comes to homemade pasta, no one cares if it is perfect. When in doubt, tell everyone you intended to make maltagliati (“badly shaped”) noodles.

I served my orecchiette yesterday in a pan sauce made of homemade Italian sausage and fresh fennel sautéed with onions, garlic, and hot pepper, and finished with some pasta cooking water, good olive oil, and Parmigiano Reggiano. I highly recommend it.

RECIPE: Homemade Orecchiette

Serves 2 with seconds or 4 without

• 120 g (4 1/4 ounces, about 1 cup) all-purpose flour

• 30 g (1 ounce, 1/4 cup) fine semolina

• 100 g (about 1/2 cup) water, at room temperature

• Coarse semolina for dusting

Have a bench scraper nearby. In a medium bowl or in a pile directly on the counter, combine the flour and the fine semolina. Blend. Make a well in the center and add the water.

A well of all-purpose and semolina flours.

Using a fork, mix the dough to moisten the flour and form a shaggy mass. If using a bowl, turn the dough out onto a clean work surface. Begin kneading the dough to moisten and incorporate as much of the flour as you can.

Work in the dry bits of dough as you knead.

Use the bench scraper to lift any bits stuck to the work surface and incorporate those, too. If you have an excessive amount of flour that just won’t cohere, dribble a few drops of water off your fingertips onto the flour to help incorporate it. Keep kneading rather vigorously until the dough becomes smooth and elastic. This can take a good five minutes or more.

Once you have a good, smooth dough, shape it into a ball, place it on a clean spot of your counter and cover with an inverted bowl or piece of plastic film and let sit for 30 minutes to an hour to relax. Clean your work surface.

Let it rest.

Dust a tray with coarse semonlina. Find a beat-up wooden cutting board. After the dough has rested, divide it into quarters. On a clean surface, without any flour, roll one quarter out into a rope about 1/2” in diameter. Using a bench scraper or a butter knife, cut the rope into 1/2” to 3/4” pieces.

Ready to be shaped.

Using a butter knife with a serrated edge, if you have it (I didn’t yesterday), dig up the wood on your board a little bit making a cross-hatch pattern. Dust the board with some all-purpose flour. Take a piece of the dough and roll it in the flour. Place it on the board, cut side up on the far side of the patch you dug up, and using the tip of your butter knife, press and drag the dough over the board so it rolls up on the knife.

Remove the dough from the knife and unfurl it over the tip of your finger or thumb, and then toss it in the semolina-dusted tray. It should look like an ear. Repeat with the remaining dough. You’ll get better as you do more.

Keep sprinkling the orecchiette in the tray lightly with semolina so they don’t stick. When done, cover the tray with a cloth and set in the fridge until ready to cook. You can also freeze them at this point and then transfer to a bag and store frozen until you want to cook.

This dough was a little soft, and my butter knife had no serrations, so the resulting pasta looks a little creepily like ears.

To cook, bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil. Add the orecchiette (directly from the freezer, if you froze them). Stir. Once the water comes back to a boil and the pasta floats to the top, cook for a couple of minutes before removing with a strainer to a pan with your sauce. The cooking water, enriched with that semolina, is a great binding tool for the sauce. Enjoy.

With sausage and fennel. Mmmmm.