What's In My Mouth

From 35,000 feet above the Canadian Arctic, I am reflecting on my first week of pasta-making.  Besides the fact that my 4-year old has announced she’s ‘tired of pasta’, my half-dozen attempts have resulted in satisfying results, and a few lessons learned.  

Such as, ambiance is everything.  (Actually this is probably better described as an old lesson, relearned.)  I’ve found that the entire dough-making and rolling-out process is more pleasurable and relaxing by candlelight, so now the first step is to light the two hurricane candles and place them on the table with the eggs and flour.  Does that sound contrived and ridiculous?  Maybe, but I don’t care.   Literally taking the spotlight off the process discourages me from inspecting my work too closely, and instead the focus transfers to the touch.

And believe me, pasta wants to be touched.  Beyond the obvious kneading, pasta benefits from much handling during the rolling-out process.  Initially I was focused on simply holding the pasta properly as I fed it into the machine, and catching it after it rolled out.  I was paranoid about not having a third hand to run the rank as I fed and caught simultaneously.  (A blogger on Chowhound claims she learned in culinary school to attach the two ends and create a pasta fan-belt, which you only need one hand to juggle while cranking until it’s done.)  But as George pointed out, there is time in between each pass when the pasta can be stretched by hand, spread across the table, flipped over, and smoothed and brushed.  All this touching facilitates the gradual but critical drying of the dough so that by final pass, you produce the thinnest, smoothest sheet of pasta yet. It also ensures you are carefully monitoring that drying process and noticing the change in consistency after each run.  Embracing this approach last night, I found that all this dough-handling also facilitates intense bonding between pasta maker and pasta.  Does it sound like I’ve lost it?  Are you asking yourself, ‘We are still talking about pasta, right?’  I’ve got to say, I feel not an insignificant investment in and affection toward the dough that began as nothing more than flour and eggs on my candlelit table.  Granted, eggs are remarkable –I don’t know how chickens do it, everyday no less—but if my dough is looking promising at the rolling-out stage, it means I have already done several things right, and pride is in order.  Besides; a clinical, sterile, mechanized approach can not possibly elicit remarkable results with anything as needy as pasta.

I’m off to Gothenburg for the week, creating a forced hiatus from pasta-making 101, and giving my daughter an apparently much-needed break from my little project.  As we fly toward Sweden , I sense the object of my obsession shifting from producing perfect pasta to consuming the perfect dessert that is served at the Hotel Avalon…

True to form, I have flung myself full-force into Pasta 101.  I began on the couch with Marcella Hazan's wise, written words from Marcella Cucina.  I particularly liked her analogy of the difference between hand-made egg pasta and store-bought dry pasta made from semolina flour:  if we were talking of fabric, the former would be the fluffiest, softest cashmere wool imaginable, and the latter an ultra-smooth linen with a 'crisp, firm hand.'  Hence, each is uniquely suited to specific sauces and preparations.  Egg pasta wants to suck up and embrace any sauce with cream and butter, but develops an unpleasant slick texture when dressed with olive oil.  Dry semolina pasta has a hard, impenetrable surface that can carry olive-oil based sauces cleanly without becoming saturated.  Not that I am even really that interested in the sauce-making; but the above description of egg pasta left me imagining what I hoped would be my pasta's porous and absorbent quality.  I kept thinking of a cat's tongue.

Contact with a wooden surface, and my human hands, I read, are the critical ingredients.  Farm fresh eggs don't hurt, either, which I am quite fortunate to have on hand.  (I'll remember that the next time I don't feel quite so affectionate toward farm living.)  I first separated 6 eggs (5 duck and 1 chicken, to be exact), setting the whites aside.  The six orange orbs waited expectedly as I scooped a modest mountain of flour onto my wooden surface.  Here I must confess that I unwittingly and incorrectly used cake flour.  I'll get that right next time.  Marching on, into the center of the flour went my egg yolks, and following George's instructions, I started blending the yolks and flour into dough with fingers alone.  My style, honestly, is much more sterile.  I prefer keeping my hands clean when I cook but this was opportunity #1 to follow the spouse's direction, so I swallowed my protest and did as told.  Once I had a recognizable fist of dough, I continued to knead for what I hope was 8 minutes, as Marcella was pretty insistent this is a requirement.  George told me to let it rest, so I did. 

After a suitable period of neglect, I brought my dough to the pasta machine and begin the process I have watched so many times: sending the dough through the machine, first with the rollers on the wideest setting, folding the pressed dough in threes, sending it through again, over and over until, well, until you're ready to do something different.  Which is when you begin cranking down the pasta machine rollers, one setting at a time, pressing the dough thinner and thinner, until you've gone from '10' setting to a '1', which is presumably thin enough to pronounce as finished.

More than the kneading, which Marcella promised to be a 'deeply satisfying rhythmic exercise', I found running the pasta dough through the machine to be my repetitive process of choice.  So much so, that I would often get down to the '2', then fold the dough up again to start from the beginning.  George assured me this was o.k., as the goal of this process was not just thinning the dough but also drying it a bit.  ('Justin Neidermeyer taught me that', he said.)  I also found that everything would be going swimmingly, my dough would be flawlessly gorgeous at '3', then I'd take it through the tiniest-bit-smaller-2 and my once-perfect dough was now scarred with ridges and ripples all over.  A sign that the dough was 'still tacky', George said, so I had permission to start all over.  This definitely appealed to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.  Plus, hey, this was my first batch; and it's technically not even 2008!  Yet a few minutes later, all of a sudden my dough was cracking and stiff when I folded it up.  "Too dry" George pronounced, you're overdoing it.  Damn.  So I rolled it out one last time, and sliced the pasta into tagliatelli strips, before it was too firm to work at all.

Yeah, I get it.  The mastery of pasta is all in the touch.  How much flour in incorporate into your eggy crater; how sticky/dry is the dough; how sticky/dry is the ambient temperature and humidity of your kitchen; and knowing when your pasta has had just enough foreplay.  Making decent pasta is not brain surgery; it's not even stitches.  I'm there already.  But the mastery --perfect pasta-- will take time and focus.  Can I do it?