Fresh, wet pasta is some of the best pasta you'll ever have in your entire life. Honestly, I'm not joking. It's simple to make the dough, but working out the dough is a chore and a half. Something made a lot simpler with an inexpensive tool, a pasta press. Of course, that's the cheap one... I couldn't get one of those, it's not prestigious enough to be on display in my tiny kitchen. So, I'd get the Atlas model, but I can't afford it. What I'd truly want is the automatic press for the Kitchenaid Mixer... but I don't have a mixer... damn. How is that almost as expensive as the mixer itself?! The other catch is, you need TONS of space to roll out the dough, Alton Brown has an elegant solution for that. I don't even have a rolling pin for my dough, my rolling pin will be a whiskey bottle and my dough cutter will be a shot glass.
When making pasta dough, all you really need to do is mix flour and egg. I add a touch of olive oil and a hint of salt for flavor. When I was in high school our home-ec class had a pasta making demonstration in which the cook used squid ink to color the dough and add a hint of fish flavor to the pasta. I wanted to emulate this, but imagine Blair's shock when I asked her to pick some up for me. After that same demonstration in high school, I tried to make the pasta in my parents' kitchen. My mother thought I was insane and laughed at how horribly wrong it went for me. Well, now is my chance to prove her wrong. You start by making a flour volcano with egg lava (cute, huh?) and the work the flour into the egg with a finger in circles until you get a dough. Off the bat, I spilled egg everywhere.
I rolled the dough out with the whiskey bottle and left it sitting out while I made the stuffing. I didn't feel like making much more of a mess, so I decided I'd stuff them with Alfredo sauce AND chicken to avoid making a filling and sauce. What a cool idea. I started by drowning the chicken in Svedka Vanilla Vodka and cream and cooking it down. Added some salt, parm, peas and a couple other things. Simple recipe. I cut out the dough with the shot glass and proceeded to stuff the ravioli. It was a lot harder than one would think. My crimps didn't take too well on the edges and the shot glass cutaway was a little too small. Overall, they turned out ok. A
little more like dumplings than ravioli, but my girlfriend appreciated them, she said they were almost like pierogi, only not fried at all. I wasn't too impressed. They were better than store bought dumplings and ravioli, but it wasn't quite what I wanted. I was really looking to get a good, old fashioned ravioli out of this. If I had a pasta press, it would have worked a hell of a lot better.
No comments:
Post a Comment