The Perfume of Pasta

About this series "Gourmet: Homemade Bread Pizza Pasta Noodle Dumplings":
I do almost all the cooking in our home, I love it. K's interest and expertise in cooking lies in dough-related food only. So when making bread, pasta, pizza from scratch (no bread machine), K and I do it together- and I love it too. This series is about "dough-food" we made together.

The Perfume of Pasta
"The world is divided between those who have had Babbo's pasta and those who have not." This was part of what I wrote on the comment card after our first meal at Mario Batali's Babbo restaurant. That night, K and I tried its pasta tasting menu. Since then we've been to Babbo five times and Del Posto once, ordered pasta tasting menu again as well as a la carte menu. Pasta lingers most in memory. The sauce was spare, yet the flavor so intense, as if Mario Batali had mixed in drops of perfume, perfume of pasta!

I had an Italian cookbook, which contains fresh pasta recipes, but I never tried them. A few months after our first Babbo dinner, I got "Babbo" cookbook as a gift from friends. This book and our dining experience at Babbo motivated me to make fresh pasta at home. Soon I developed that perfume of pasta too! The "secret formula": fresh pasta + precisely al dente + spare sauce+a little pasta water. I suspect Batali's "formula" also includes a touch of butter sometimes. We are not crazy about butter, and usually try to minimize it as much as possible. For us, without butter, tastes just as good.

Dried pasta can be delicious, but fresh ones is worldly different and better. However, to bring out the superb taste, you need to be precise in boiling. Perfection is defined as "al dente"- fully cooked yet firm to the bite. Boiling plays a make-or-brake role. Sauce? I'd say only 10% importance, and you really need just a little. A little pasta water helps "loosen" the pasta and infuse the sauce flavor.

Below are pictures of some fresh pasta we made (not from Babbo book or any other book): mint ravioli with corn and chicken, short rib red wine ravioli, chiptole apple and turkey ravioli, tequila jalapeno shrimp tortellini, pumpkin pappardelle with veal bolognese, chestnut pappardelle with ginger yuzu sake chicken and woodear.

Often I make the dough and the filling/sauce, K helps to roll out/cut/wrap, and I boil it. We had many pasta meals that after the first bite, both of us would give an "opening statement": just like at Babbo! Wow! So good! Then silence and diligent digging.

I'd say, Babbo's pasta tasting menu $69 (plus drinks+tax+tip), worths every penny; making pasta at home with loved ones, priceless.

Below are more detailed comments and recipes from my experiments:

Basic Pasta Dough:
Pasta dough involves only flour, egg and olive oil. We use KitchenAid mixer, but kneading with hands is easy and fast too. (However, in the second stage- roll out and cut the dough sheets , electric pasta attachment is much faster and easier than hands.) My basic pasta dough recipe is slightly different from Babbo book. I find Babbo book's suggestion of flour portion a little too much. Certainly one should adjust according to the humidity in the air and size of eggs.

My basic dough recipe:
about 1 1/4 cup flour
2 eggs (I use Eggland's Best Grade A Organic eggs, they are not big)
1/4 tsp extra virgin olive oil
serving: 4

As a rule of thumb, don't put all flour in the beginning. I always start with 1 cup flour, add eggs and oil. Then use "stir" on the KitchenAid, if too sticky, I gradually add more flour (most of time up to about 1/4 cup). When a rough ball forms, I use setting "2" to mix for a few minutes to make a smooth ball.

Wrap dough in plastic wrap tightly and rest it in room temperature for 30min. This allows the gluten in the flour to develop.

Semolina flour or whole wheat flour?
You can use 100% semolina flour or mix in just some. I found semolina flour has lower yields. Have not tried whole wheat yet, certainly should try. (In pizza dough, when we mix in whole wheat, we add honey to mask its grainy taste.)

Other ingredients?
I've mixed in shocked mint, black pepper, roasted pumpkin and chestnuts too.

Cutting/Shaping:
We have the KitchenAid attachment set: a roller, a fettuccine cutter, a speghetti cutter. We most often just use the roller to flatten the dough into sheets, because we like to make pappardelle and ravioli most.

For Pappardelle, we roll out the dough to setting #4. For ravioli sheets, we roll to setting #5. (In Babbo book, it suggests the thinnest setting for ravioli, it did not indicate if using KitchenAid. We tried it on KitchenAid and found it too thin. We like the dough part to have some body, not paper thin.)

I don't use any mold to make ravioli. To use any mold, you have to roll the pasta sheet into a size that fits the mold first, that requires some exact "calculating" (which adds nothing to taste). Using mold also means having to washing it, need for storage space, etc. I prefer the simplest and fastest: fold pasta sheet corner to guide cutting into squares, put filling in the middle, fold diagonally to form a triangle and press the sides to close. (As seen in album above.)

Boiling:
In my experience, for perfectly al dente, it often means 1 minute's boiling for pappardelle, and about 1.5-2 minutes' for ravioli. It's crucial to remember that pasta continues to cook after you take it out of boiling water and put it on the plate.

Sauce/filling:
As a Chinese, I learned about pasta making and traditional sauces like bolognese from cookbook recipes. But I did not follow any recipe to create sauces/fillings I mentioned above and presented in the album. My creations are based on principles in traditional recipes, with inspirations from what's fresh/seasonal in the market, what I had in the fridge/pantry, my travels, and with a desire to always make something different, interesting and tasty.

And principle in traditional pasta sauce/filling is simple, the main ingredients often consist of base vegetable flavors (onion+celery+carrot), fragrance enhancer (such as garlic), meats, liquid flavoring (such as wine/liquor, tomato sauce), herbs and salt & pepper. Play with the elements! In my red wine short rib ravioli filling, I used only onion, celery, boneless short rib, red wine, thyme, salt and pepper.

Here is my twist of traditonal veal Bolognese. I used very little tomato sauce and used dry Vermonth instead of wine.
onion 1 small
celery 2 stalks
carrot 1 pcs
garlic 4 gloves
veal, ground* 1/3 Ibs
pork, ground* 1/3 Ibs
crushed tomato sauce 4 tbs
milk 1/4 cup
Vermonth 1/4 cup
thyme sprigs
S&P

*I like to ground meat myself using my santoku knife. I found the ready ground meat too fine, I want a little more body and texture. I got veal stew chunks and pork butt from Whole Foods, cut them into smaller pieces and with the Santoku knife, just a few minutes, I got the ground meat in fineness I prefer.