Parma Palate – Pasta Patrol

Making pasta from scratch is not such a hard thing…or is it?  At home in Canada I usually make the dough in a food processor, which means dough ready to rest in about 5 minutes.  Half an hour later, it passes easily through the rollers of my machine to make thin sheets for lasagna. (see my wife Ramona’s Lasagna Project)

It’s a little different here in Italy without a food processor in the kitchen, so although roommate Andy purchased a rolling machine, I had to make the dough by hand, in the time-honoured tradition of pouring a hill of flour (00 grade) on the table, making a well in it, cracking a couple of eggs into the well along with a little olive oil and salt.  Slowly incorporating the eggs into the flour requires a little finesse, then a lot of needing, and an hour to rest.  But as you see here, the dough did its thing.  And both Andy and my classmate Amy took turns at rolling out the dough.

Amy did very well for a beginner.  I actually thought the sheet that she rolled out was the thinnest and most uniform. After letting the sheets dry for a while, we cut them into fettucini strips and presented them to our classmate Marta for her birthday. She had actually run out of paella at the party, so the noodles were pressed into action along with a delicious tomato sauce some of the chefs from the Alma cooking school whipped up.  Always great to have chefs at a party!

Flushed with  success, I decided the following Sunday would be a great day to attempt making something like the tortelli di zucca, a very traditional Emilia-Romagna dish of largish pouches of pasta stuffed with roasted and sweetened puree of pumpkin.  The accompaniments?  Fresh fennel and orange salad with black olives, another salad with sliced mozzarella di bufala (water buffalo mozzarella), arugula and prosciutto, and stuffed and fried fiori di zucca. (zucchini flowers)

If that sounds ambitious, it wasn’t really, just some slicing and stuffing and frying and pasta  making.  Except that’s where things started to break down.  Although I used the same amount of ingredients, and even added some water, to last week’s pasta recipe amounts, the damn dough would not co-operate and no matter how much we all tried to roll it out, it remained stubbornly fractured and stringy.  Finally we managed to get one sheet rolled out and stuffed….and they were good to eat!  (served with a little sage butter sauce)  The other problem children were the zucchini flowers.  I learned that if you buy the flowers on Thursday, you should use them on Thursday! By Sunday the ends of the flowers had rotted, but Amy managed to trim them and clean them up, and there were still usable pouches into which I stuffed a mixture of fresh, chopped shrimp and ricotta cheese.  The batter was made with flour and beer, and they were quite tasty, so a good save there…

Here are also the pics of the mozzarella salad and the fennel and  orange salad, not bad if I do say so myself, with help from Betsy, Amy and Andy.  A lot of other stuff happened last week, including our welcome dinner with the staff at our University, Turkish food night courtesy Betsy and a day trip to the beautiful city of Bologna….but you’ll have to check back again for those stories…