Homemade Pasta - Fettucine with Porcini

After many indecisions, we finally bought a pasta machine... Hurray! It's an Imperia, just like this one:

We are quite pleased with it so far: it is not the type of gadget that one is going to use everyday, but hopefully it won't be only gathering dust in the pantry.

Our first attempt at making pasta at home was successful. We thought about a sauce that would bring out the freshness of the pasta without overwhelming it, and came up with the idea of a porcini-based sauce using some milk. We made the sauce before tackling the pasta, just to get that out of the way.

Ingredients for the sauce:
- 40 g of dried porcini
- milk
- one small onion, finely chopped
- one garlic clove
- one bay leaf
- salt, pepper, nutmeg

Soak the mushrooms in a cup of boiling water for half an our. Heat some olive oil in a large saute pan. Press on the garlic clove with the side of a knife, and let it colour in the olive oil, along with the bay leaf. When the garlic is golden, add the onion. Let it fry gently without colouring. Squeeze as much water as possible from the soaked mushrooms, and coarsely chop them. Reserve the soaking liquid and strain it through a fine sieve. Add the mushrooms to the sautepan and let them fry for a few moments. Add the soaking liquid, let it get to the boiling point, reduce to low heat and slowly simmer until most of the liquid has evaporated. Season with salt, pepper, a bit of nutmeg. Add then about half a cup of milk, and reduce to a nice creamy sauce.

Ingredients for the fresh pasta:
-350 g of white bread machine flour
-2/3 eggs

We basically followed the instructions that came with the machine, but had to improvise a bit here and there. Various sources suggested different number of eggs for the same amount of flour. We decided to try to use as little egg as possible, and followed the instructions that came with the machine: 350g of flour and two (large) eggs. This was not enough, and a third egg was used. Below is a rough description of the whole process:

1. Pile the flour on a working surface and make a well in the middle. Put the eggs (2 initially) inside this well, and with a fork start incorporating them into the flour, sort of like making cement. The eggs should bind all the flour; if not, add another one. Knead the flour by pushing it away from you, on top of the surface, with the back of your wrists. If necessary, add a few drops of warm water. The final consistency should be plasticine-like, without sticking to your fingers. Make a ball with the dough, put it in a bowl, cover with a damp tea towel, and let it rest for half an hour.
2. Knead the dough a bit more, and cut it in 6 pieces. Cover the pieces of dough with a damp tea towel to avoid them drying up. Grab a bit of dough and pass it through the rolls, starting with the widest setting. Fold the sheet in two each time, and repeat 3-4 times. Gradually reduce the separation between the rolls, until you reach the thinnest setting. At this point, you should have a thin, long sheet that must dry for a bit before cutting. We hanged ours on a clothes drying rack:
3. Before starting the cutting process, the dough must not be too wet. If it is, it will jam the machine. It should not be too dry either, as it will just crack when in contact with the blades. Cut each of the sheets of dough in half lengthwise, and pass each one through the cutter. Hang the fettucine again on the racks, as they should dry a bit more before cooking.
4. Heat a large quantity of water in a big pot. Add salt. When it reaches the boiling point, add the fettucine. We did this in two batches. It takes literally a minute or two to cook the pasta, so be careful. Put the pasta directly in the sautepan containing the sauce, and add a bit of the cooking water to thin it. Fresh pasta seems to soak a lot of sauce, which on the one hand is good, but on the other can be a bit problematic, so the cooking water can be quite useful. Eat at once!

Spinach Risotto

We bought a beautiful cookbook called French, by Damien Pignolet, the idea being that this is one of the few cuisines about which we don't have a book. Needless to say, the recipes are very sophisticated --- and time-consuming, but we are very interested in experimenting with the ideas found in this excellent book.

We started with something not very complicated --- but hardly French. The author of the book argues that in certain regions of France, due to the geographical proximity, people do indeed traditionally cook pasta and riso, and hence he includes a chapter on these things.



I am not going to explain how to make a risotto here, and we followed the recipe very loosely. The interesting part of this dish is that we quickly boiled a whole bag of spinach, squeezed out as much water as possible from the leaves, and then pureed them. You are left with a very small amount of very deep-coloured green puree, that is added to the risotto during the final stage, when the riso is almost cooked and one just adds a bit of butter and grated parmesan --- the mantecare stage.

The result is very good and beautiful to look at. Very velvety...

Pappa al Pomodoro

Tomato soup is a quite popular lunch treat in England - at least the tinned variety is certainly very common! This has excited our curiosity about this dish, and for some time we kept our eyes peeled for interesting recipes for the real kind of tomato soup: the one that does not come out of a can. We have a Jamie Oliver book that features such a recipe, but for some reason we never felt really compelled to trying it out. To summarise, the whole thing has been in the back of our minds for some time.

One of these days I stepped into a Border's and as usually browsed through the wine/gourmet/cookery magazines. One in particular caught my attention: Saveur. It featured an article about Buffalo wings, a dish we had tried just a few days before, but also seemed to have several recipes/articles worthy of a more careful reading. I decided to buy it. Inside there was this interesting article about Florence trattorias, and with it came a recipe for a sort of tomato soup: pappa al pomodoro. It seems to be a very typical Tuscan dish, there are tons of recipes for this soup on the web. The one featured in the magazine is somewhat different from most we saw, and apparently it's this soup that is served at a trattoria called Coco Lezzone. We strongly recommend it! The recipe we are going to write down is the one we actually implemented, obviously a slight variation on what is described in the magazine...

Ingredients:

-4 tins of good-quality plum tomatoes
-2 leeks, white and pale green part only, washed and finely chopped
- a couple of slices of stale bread (the rougher the better)
-1 cube of organic chicken broth (sorry!)
-2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
-olive oil, salt, pepper, basil leaves

In a Le Creuset-type pot, heat a few slugs of olive oil. When the oil is hot, add the garlic and let it sizzle until it loses the rawness. Next, add the leeks, turn the heat down and let them slowly sweat, stirring often. No rush, the slower the better. Once the leeks are nice and cooked, add the tomatoes. What I do is to make sure the rougher part of each tomato is discarded, and I sort of squeeze each tomato in my hand so that it goes into the pot almost as a paste. I used the seeds and the juice also. Dissolve the cube of organic chicken stock in 1/2 a liter of boiling water and add this stock to the pot. Turn the heat up to get to the boiling point, and then turn it down and let the soup simmer for a good 30-45 minutes until everything has fallen apart and looks like a very nice pasta sauce. Take the pot from the heat source and add the bread broken in small pieces, pushing it inside the soup. Wait for an extra 30 minutes or so, until the bread has absorbed all the moisture. At that point, whisk the soup vigorously until it looks like porridge. Season with salt and pepper, add the basil leaves finely chopped, perhaps a bit more oil, reheat gently and serve: