Sonoma chef shares secrets to perfect homemade pasta
There are many home cooks who are afraid to make their own pasta. These are usually the same folks who fear pie crust and are haunted by visions of dough and the white flour stuck all over their hands and kitchen counters.
Do you resemble that remark? And do you ever wonder, “If I can purchase dried pasta out of a box, is it really worth the time and effort to mix, knead, rest, roll out and cut my own pasta dough?”
For those who adore the silky texture and the delicate, eggy flavor of fresh pasta, the answer is a resounding “Si!” It’s only flour and eggs and water, after all. What could go wrong?
Well, as it turns out, it’s not always easy. While there are dozens of perfect pastas out there - think about the last time you ate at Scopa in Healdsburg or Cannetti Roadhouse in Forestville - it turns out that there is no perfect recipe for making pasta.
“It all depends on the weather,” said chef/instructor Lisa Lavagetto, who taught a pasta class earlier this month at Ramekins Cooking School in Sonoma. “Humidity can make a difference.”
After Lavagetto threw together her dry ingredients (flour and salt) to make agnolotti, a small ravioli, she added the eggs and olive oil to a stand mixer with a dough hook.
“After you add the eggs, look for the dough to come together around the beater,” she said. “If it’s too dry, add water until it barely comes together.”
The dough flagrantly refused to come together until Lavagetto splashed water on it several times, demonstrating one of those pesky pitfalls.
Here are some other tips Lavagetto offered for making your pasta dough behave as it should:
When you throw the dry ingredients together, mix and aerate them a little.
Always use large eggs. All pasta recipes are written for large eggs.
If you don’t have a stand mixer, try making it by hand, the way Italian nonnas have been doing for centuries. Simply make a mound of the dry ingredients, put the eggs in the middle and then using a fork, in a circular motion, mix the dry and wet ingredients together.
After the dough comes together, hand knead it, folding it on itself and using the heel of your hand to push it away. “I always hand knead it, because that tells me how the dough is doing,” Lavagetto said.
Don’t try to roll it out right away or you will end up with tough pasta. “I rest the dough for a half hour to three hours,” she said.
If you mess up while rolling out the dough, don’t try to re-roll it immediately or it will be tough. Let it rest again, and start over.
Once the dough has rested and the glutens have relaxed, you need to run the dough through some kind of flattening machine: that means either hand-cranked pasta machine from Italy or a pasta attachment (with roller and cutters) for your stand mixer.
“The hand-cranker works wonderfully, but it’s a challenge by yourself,” she said. “You need three hands.”
The pasta attachment is a bit pricey but worth it if you end up making a lot of your own fresh pasta.
For her classes, Lavagetto always uses the pasta attachment roller, which has settings that go from 1 (the thickest setting) to 10. The only down side is that the attachments need to be re-oiled once a year or they will squeak loudly.
“Never put the attachment in water,” she warned. “Just brush it off.”
For cutting the pasta, you can go as old school or as high-tech as you want. The class used an old-fashioned pastry cutter to make fresh farfalle (butterflies) and the agnolotti (stuffed raviolis; simple wooden stamps to make flat corzetti; and a chitarra maker (wood box with metal strings) to make the long, thin spaghetti known as chitarra.
While rolling and cutting the dough, it’s important to keep a “bench” of extra flour to prevent the dough from sticking when it goes through the machine.
If you are stuffing the pasta, you want to roll it out at least to the 5 setting, because you want the pasta to be thinner.
To use the chitarra, Lavagetto demonstrated how to put flour on the side of the dough facing down against the strings. Then she rubbed a rolling pin back and forth over the dough and the strings, which eventually cut the dough into narrow strings.
The corzetti, a pasta that comes from the heart of Genoa, are even easier. You simply cut them into circles with the hollow side of the stamp, like a cookie cutter, then imprint them with the design side.
The farfalle are crimped along the edge with the pastry wheel, then cut into rectangles and pinched.
The agnolotti are made with long strips, crimped along the edges, then folded lengthwise over little mounds of filling. In between the filling, you press the dough together and cut to separate.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: