Does anyone make their own pasta?

How do you make your bolognese?

I looked up recipes recently and saw that many of them don't include cream. I've always made mine with cream and thought it was kind of the defining factor of bolognese. A lot of the recipes I saw look like marinara. I'm confused.

Anyway...

The pasta is drying, it ran through the machine without a hitch.

I confess I used my stand mixer to kneed the dough so it was really glutinous. I don't know if I could have gotten that consistency by hand.

I think I'll make two sauces. Mo wants a tomato sauce and I want a light Parmesan lemon cream sauce since I have fish to serve with it and I can't stand tomato and fish together.

I'm really proud of Mo. He's becoming quite a good cook.

I love that it gives us something fun to do together.

I make those!

Well.... I make them every time I visit my mom. Mr. B and Mo don't like chicken and dumplings.

The nerve!

They don’t! Blasphemy! Chicken and dumplings are fabulous.

homemade pastas are always too thick, like the kluskis of my culture,sometimes more dough can be too much.Anyway the sauce needs to rule, not the pasta;the pasta is just a tool that delivers the taste.

Total hick food

That's like saying the French bread rolls from my favorite bakery are the same as hot dog buns.

I think the conveyance makes a huge difference.

Marcella Hazan's recipe.
I probably have it typed up at a2k. It's a tad on the severe side so I've been known to spice it up, but her basic recipe is gold standard bolognese from Bologna. Milk is in her recipe and other people's for the effect it has on the meat, and it is also used in some other meat recipes besides a ragu, such as lamb cooked in milk.

I did type it up -
http://able2know.org/topic/109277-1#post-3012220

The dumplings for chicken and dumplings don't have to be thick and doughy, and neither do egg noodles. It's a measure of the cook's skill to roll them out thin. That being said, the dumplings in chicken and dumplings should be thicker than egg noodles, and should be cooked thoroughly in the chicken stock before the chicken is added. I knew one woman whose dumplings were neither thin nor thick, and were very light. She would use them in deserts, too, cooking them with various types of berry compotes.

different types of pasta as substrate, different sauces, different people. . .

Most of the recipes that I have seen online lately for homemade fresh pasta say knead the dough x amount of time, and yes, this does develop the gluten.

But - my italian teacher (from Bologna) mixed the egg and flour together and that was it, mushing it together only to see the whole thing adhered. According to Marcella Hazan, "the pasta machine does the kneading" (as the pasta passes through the press). Fresh pasta isn't meant to be especially chewy, says osso.

She describes the usual make a well in the flour, add the eggs and stirring the flour from the side into the egg(s), and says: "When the eggs cease to be runny, tumble the rest of the flour over them, and working with palms and fingertips, push and squeeze the eggs and flour until they are a well-combined but somewhat crumbly paste. If the eggs were very large, or had exceptional flour-absorption qualities, the mass may be on the moist and sticky side. Add as much flour as the mass will absorb without being stiff and dry, but do not exceed one cup of flour per egg.

This is from her "The Classic Italian Cookbook".

Thanks, osso. That sounds like good advice. I'll most definitely keep that in mind for next time.

The pasta last night was a little chewy but not overly so. I'm sure it will take some experimentation. I suggested to Mo that he keep a notebook chronicling his attempts and their results.

nononono

you need to get to know a better noodle maker

I don't think you want a particularly glutinous dough for good pasta. Barely stuck together before it first goes through the roller is usually best. Making the pasta finer as it goes through the rollers is enough gluten-making.

Kinda like muffins and biscuits - you def. don't want those over-mixed.

Righto. Thing is, a lot of people, for good reason, think fresh pasta is that "fresh pasta" you get in a regular market in a package. Fine if you're desperate, kidding, but it's a whole different animal from homemade, and not a much like dried durum semolina pasta.

Story - many years ago now, when I first knew Dys and Diane and Roger, and we were eating at D & D's, I made fresh pasta to go with Hazan's bolognese. That bolognese takes me a while and I usually make it the day before. Roger said it was the best pasta he'd ever had (he helped with the cranking). Diane didn't like the sauce (well, it is different from the usual, kind of a velvety meat sauce, not really like the american southern italian gravy), and Dys probably said something nice.

So, an adventure.

I just made some pasta after googling on youtube -

1.5 c. flour
.25 c. semolina flour
4 eggs
1 T. oil
1 tsp salt

It looks great.

I suggest anybody doing this for the first time watch several youtubes on it to get a general idea.

If you're making ravioli, one Italian chef suggests using egg yolks not whole eggs because the dough is more delicate.

Me, enough with delicate - I tried some ravioli using cake flour. Eh!

I've no idea about that recipe - I'm into the cup of flour max per egg, but am open to hearing it works.

I'm a semolina fan though. Those semolina pancakes I made turned out tasty, and I've made bread with only semolina before (worked) - thing is, I used to be able to get semolina at ital markets in 5 lb bags. Now in my locals we have Red Mill robber barons (sorry) selling it in wee packages.

Tonight is round 2 with homemade pasta making.

This time we used semolina flour. I've never used it before for anything and was really surprised by it's texture -- more like cornmeal. It was really cool because it made clear to Mo that cooking is about experimentation and refining one's recipe.

We let the machine do the kneading this time but I'm worried that it didn't work it quite enough. It was SO delicate. I hope it doesn't just fall apart when we cook it.

Osso, I tried your one egg per cup of flour and couldn't get it to form a dough at all. I ended up adding another egg and it came together fine. Are you adding oil, or water, or some other liquid to get a dough with that egg/flour ratio?

Anyway.....

I'm enjoying doing some "bigger" cooking with Mo. He's becoming much more open to trying new foods too. And he's really tasting things and trying to determine what it's made of and speculating on how it was made.

We were looking over camps for spring break and he zeroed in on a cooking camp but all of his football buddies kind of teased him about it so I don't know if it will happen.

Was that with semolina? I've not used semolina for pasta, as that is usually used for the dried type manufactured pasta - though I'm not positive it isn't in some fresh ones - probably is, but probably not 100% semolina. Anyway, there are likely recipes for it.
I have a vague recollection that someone on a2k (butrflynet or maybe Mame) mentioned a video where some fellow used both flours, but I don't remember if it was for pasta or bread. (Videos don't work for me right now since I don't have adobe flash.)

I have used 100% semolina for bread, though, but that has more ingredients.

Just looked it up - it's in the Carol Field Italian Baker book as Pane Tipo Altamura /durum-flour bread from Altamura. That uses a biga, a kind of starter. Exceptionally rustic bread, I take it.
Looking around, there's another bread recipe in there that uses 1/4 part semolina and 3/4 part unbleached stone ground flour.

Also made 1/2 semolina 1/2 ap flour pancakes recently; that worked and I'm going to try that again. (recipe is on one of the cooking threads here)

I've got a bunch of pasta books to look through, but manana (well, domani).

Our last round of pasta turned out really good.

Half AP flour, half semolina, well kneaded, long resting period.

I think the well kneaded (really gets things smooth and silky) coupled with the long rest (lets the gluten break down) is the secret to getting it right.

Good, glad that worked. I'll try it. (dammit, hard to buy 5 lbs of semolina around here)

I was going to come back and post that I saw mention of a restaurant in San Francisco serving semolina gnocchi...
I forget which one, not that it matters, just that semolina gnocchi exists for us gnocchi fans... which if I knew, I'd forgotten.