Making pasta. continued

This evening I made tagliatelle, again following Marcella Hazan's recipe. Some observations:

• Other pasta recipes call for 1 cup flour, 1 egg, maybe 1 tablespoon of oil, and a bit of water as needed. Hazan has 1 cup flour and 2 eggs. How can this work with so much egg? Certainly it's not possible to make a "well" in 1 cup of flour that holds 2 large eggs. And I'm definitely adding quite a bit of flour, certainly over 1/2 cup and maybe pushing 1 whole cup, to make a dough that holds together and isn't too sticky. Puzzling.
  
• Tonight I did the basic mixing and the start of the kneading in my largest stainless steel bowl. Once the dough was the right kind of texture I finished the kneading on the countertop. Although it's one extra dish to clean, the counter mess was much easier to clean up, since it was basically just loose flour.
  
• I rolled the sheets to 7 again, using lots of flour to help out. After 6, I cut the sheets in half across, dredged in flour, then rolled at 7, feeding the cut edge in first. This worked quite well. Not sure I like the tagliatelle rolled so thin, though. The fettucine were better.
  
• This was the first time I used my new tagliatelle cutter attachment for the pasta machine. It feels a bit different from the narrower ones. It seems to be more sensitive to the weight of the incoming pasta sheet, so you need to lift the sheet to keep the cutter from spinning its wheels.
  

Making pasta

I haven't made pasta since we moved, so this Cooking Italty assignment is a treat. Don't know why I'd never really read the pasta-making instructions in this Hazan book before; it's quite a good discussion.

Hazan calls the little square strands cut by my basic cutter tonnarelli. It's nice to have a name for this. The box for the pasta maker (Atlas) says this cutter makes spaghetti, but the result is square in profile, so clearly not spaghetti as I know it. (The other cutters I bought myself also have strange names, but are essentially one for fettucine and one for tagliatelle.)

The flour discussion was interesting. She recommends not using semolina flour. I tried using it for a while, but gave it up. Pasta made with regular patent bloem (Dutch unbleached white flour) seemed to be just as tasty and the dough was much easier to handle. In France, I haven't yet discovered the equivalent of unbleached white flour. The flours here are numbered, and I'm using #45, which seems to work like all-purpose flour, but I doubt if it's unbleached. Hazan recommends Italian flour #00, doppio zero, which I'm sure I've seen in The Netherlands. I'll look for this when we visit.

I loved Hazan's description of rolling out pasta by hand, but doubt if I'll ever try that. This time I gathered up my courage and tried the volcano-on-the-counter method for mixing the dough, rather than using the food processor, but I can't say it was a success. Hazan's basic recipe is 1 cup flour with 2 large eggs, rather than the 1 cup flour, 1 large egg, 1 tablespoon olive oil, and water as needed that I've generally used before. One cup of flour does not make a well big enough to hold two eggs, so the mess did not remain very well contained. Also it seemed to want quite a bit of extra flour to make a dough that was not terrible sticky. I might do this again, but use my largest stainless steel bowl rather than the countertop, to contain the mess and make cleanup easier.

Hazan then has you divide the lump of dough into sixths (i.e., twice the number of pieces as there are eggs :-). She runs each piece through on a single setting and lays it out on a towel. Then each piece on the next setting. And so on, all the way through the settings. Not. One piece goes through all through all the settings, then off to hang on my nifty pasta rack (birthday gift, thank you, Tosca!) before cutting.

Although Hazan doesn't mention this, when running through the thicknesses, you can easily skip one of the early numbers. I usually skip 3 or 4. Also, after I've finished 1, I dip dredge the pasta sheet in a bit of flour, then proceed through the numbers. Just before or after the last thickness, I do this again. It seems to help the cut strands to stay separate if the sheet is a bit floury. This doesn't seem to affect the taste, since the extra flour boils off when the pasta is cooked.

Contrary to most instructions I've read, Hazan has you roll your pasta all the way through setting 7. Most books recommend stopping after 6. I went all the way this time ;-), and am ambivalent about the results. Because the pieces were rather long by the time, it was difficult to catch the start of the sheet coming through. As a result, where it folded upon itself, especially at the beginning of the sheet, the dough was often stuck together. Flouring before rolling at 7 helped this, but it was still an issue. Following 7, the pieces were really long and I cut them in half to make them easier to handle.

When the 7-rolled pasta was cooked there was a lot more pasta than when I stop at 6. This is why she says 1 cup of flour yields three standard portions. Stopping at 6, we serve only two people. Of course, it's the same amount in total, but the volume on the plate is much larger at 7. Two of us ate it all tonight anyway. I haven't had the nerve to serve fresh pasta to anyone else yet.