Dina took the girls out and I went to work.
Following are some shots that I took while working and some comments related to what was going on.
The Pasta
It all starts with the pasta. Here, I'm making the basic well as suggested by favorite chef Mario Batali.
Next, we mix and break down the well. At this point, its in with the hands and the start of the kneading. It takes about 10 minutes or so of kneading and flour management until you get the right consistency for the dough. Obviously no pictures of the kneading process...just too messy!
At this point, we have our formed doughball. Don't adjust your sets folks, this is in fact green dough. I added spinach to the dough for some color and seasonality.The dough was wrapped in plastic wrap and allowed to set for 30 minutes. In all I made 6 balls of dough.
The Filling
I decided to make two fillings. One filling would be a meat filling whose recipe I just winged, the other would be the classic style ricotta cheese filling.For the meat filling, I started with pancetta and rendered out the fat.
I mean really, how can you go wrong when you start out with bacon fat?
At this point, I brought in some sirloin, italian sausage and onions and began to cook. One thing that a lot of people don't do is cook their ground meats long enough. This was going to be a sort of bolognese style, so I cooked the meat for like 30 to 40 minutes or until it began to carmelize with yumminess.
You can see in the following picturehow some of the meat has begun to carmelize and develop a deeper flavor .
To the meat I added some parmesan, ricotta, fresh parsley, nutmeg and an egg. I hand mixed then moved to the food processor because I wanted to make sure that the meat was ground and had the same consistency throughout.
Your finished product.
The second filling was a standard ricotta sytle filling that contained ricotta cheese, parmesan,fresh parsley, an egg and some nutmeg. I also added some cooked pancetta to give it a bit of a smoky flavor.
A quick spin in the processor and this filling was done as well.
Putting it Together
It was time to put it all together, and for this I was going to use a brand new kitchen gadget bought just for this effort. I've been cutting the pasta by hand, using a round cookie cutter and putting the pieces together, but now I have a manual pasta cutter.You can see in this picture that I placed two pieces of tape on either side of the pasta maker. These would be my guide to determine how long each piece of pasta should be cut. Two pieces per batch of pasta
I rolled out the spinach pasta using the mixer and the pasta maker that I've been using for the last year.
The first piece of pasta is laid over a steel plate with 12 holes. The plastic cup piece is used to ident or make pockets in the pasta. Those pockets are then filled with about a tablespoon of the filling.
Once filled, another piece of pasta is laid over the top. A roller is used to roll out any air and press the pasta together. Ridges on the steel plate are eventually exposed and cut the pasta into the shape we've all come to love.
The pasta was then dumped out onto a tray where it would eventually hit the freezer.We made a couple of batches of Mario's Basic Tomato Sauce and gave a cup or two to each friend with a requirement that it be used like a condiment, not drowning the pasta!
