I really love KFC, and that makes me a massive hypocrite for what comes next. I fervently believe that almost all foodstuffs sold nowadays are choc full of crap that makes us sick. That being said, I also really like eating it. So an occasional phase that I’ll have is deciding to only eat entirely unprocessed foods. I’ll eat just meat and veg, and won’t buy biscuits, cheese, and all the other bits that make live worth living. This phase usually lasts a day or two before I pass by a supermarket and realise that I need a treat for good behaviour, and end up buying twice as much crap to compensate for my lost day.
Now imagine a really cool, non-hypocritical version of me. Someone who has the belief that we should only strive to eat unprocessed foods and thus, decides to do so. Everything I eat, I’d have to have made from the raw ingredients, meaning I’d have a full understanding of what would go in my body. I imagine that if I was this person, I’d look something like a Greek God, but alas, I very much do not.
So I decided, one of the tamer items on ✓ Project Bucket List, would be to make a really damn good plate of homemade pasta. I’ve scoured the internet for a recipes, and I’ll detail the food we made below.
We made pasta when we were staying up at the Lake District, and it’s a wonderful date night idea. Plus, I really back the idea of making staple food from scratch at least once, so you can understand what goes into it, and so you can taste the difference between the stuff you buy from the shop, and the stuff you can make from scratch.
Ingredients
- 420g All purpose flour
- 4 large eggs
- 1 bottle of wine
How to make pasta from scratch
Stick all your flour in a big pile on the table, then make a little crater with your hands. Then, change into some different trousers after you get your nice ones covered in white flour spots. Pour the glass of wine, and have a drink. Once you’ve got changed and you’ve got your crater in a nice circle, crack your eggs and stick them in that crater, then, grab a fork and start tipping the flour around the crater into the crater. The idea is that you’re mixing the eggs with the flour on a table, that makes it more artisan, you see?
Keep mixing the dough with your hands until it’s a nice smooth ball.
When you’ve mixed it all up, ask your girlfriend if she thinks it’s mixed enough, then carry on going when the answer is no. It turns out your version of a smooth ball is not nearly smooth as it needs to be. While she’s fixing your mess, have some more wine.
Once it’s in a smooth ball, then wrap it in clingfilm, and stick it in the fridge for an hour. Drink the rest of the bottle of wine. Oh, and if while you were making the dough, it was a little too dry, just add a tiny splash of water to it. If it’s too wet, add some more flour.
Once you’ve waited an hour, or screw it, 45 minutes is probably fine too, take the dough out and split it into 4 pieces. Go look in the drawers for a rolling pin, you know there must be one somewhere around here, no, I didn’t have it earlier, I don’t know where – oh let’s just use this big wooden spoon. Stick a bit of flour on the table you’re using (this makes it artisan, remember?), so that the dough doesn’t stick, and roll the dough out with the big wooden spoon. Try and keep the whole thing as even as possible, but if you can’t do that, don’t worry. Artisan pasta isn’t perfect.
Now, you can cut the pasta into any shape you want! If you’ve got a pasta cutter, first off, you should know better than to be reading a pasta recipe from me, you probably have your own tricks, this is like a learner driver telling an F1 speedyboy what a clutch is. If you don’t have a pasta cutter, immediately panic and think about how dinner is ruined, before realising that there’s a specific cut of pasta that’s been designed just for this occasion.
Tagliatelle!
It’s the pasta version of the cuba libre cocktail, you want to sound posh saying it, but really it’s just long strips of pasta. Stick some more flour on the top of your rolled out dough so that it doesn’t stick to itself, roll it up, and then slice it into little strips, around half a cm long. When they unwrap, you end up with this artisan looking bowl full of fresh pasta.
Important note, doesn’t matter how hungry you are at this point, I know I tricked you with the bit where you have to wait for an hour, don’t eat the raw pasta. That’s bad. Instead, stick a load of salt in a big pot of boiling water, and dump the pasta in, making sure that the water spills all over the fucking counter. Another mess to tidy up later.
Once you’ve stuck the pasta in, wait for it to boil again, then bring it down to a simmer, and wait, like, 3 minutes. The pasta should float up when it’s ready to eat, but if you’re anything like me, you made too much pasta and didn’t have a big enough pan, so it’s impossible to see if it’s floating or just full. Nice one.
Ready for some trickery?
Right at the start of this recipe, you should have agreed with your girlfriend that she was going to make the sauce, and you were going to make the pasta. If you didn’t do this, sucks to be you, learn the lesson of reading a recipe through before you start it, and enjoy your plain pasta (I heard it’s good with butter and garlic in a pinch).
Now because I knew what was coming, Kymberley was already on it and making the sauce and meatballs. I’ve asked her to come in and give me a rundown on the recipe, so here it is below:
Ingredients
- Meatballs
- Tomato puree
- Diced garlic
- Diced red onion
- Red wine
- Worcester sauce
- Salt and pepper
“Tomato-y garlick-y sauce. I think it was one of those hapdash things. “
“Sear the meatballs in hot olive oil. Remove the meatballs, you want a load of the meatball juice to be left in the pan. Add diced garlic, you can get those pre-diced jars if you don’t fancy slaving over garlic for an evening. Careful, this’ll burn quick. Add some diced red onion, you’ll probably have to cut that yourself unfortunately. Don’t cry. Then, add loads of tomato puree and pasta water until the whole thing becomes a sauce, then add the meatballs in and let it simmer. Obviously, seasoned to taste. We didn’t do anything fancy with loads of veg, it was literally tomato sauce, wasn’t it? We may have added a Worcester sauce and a load of red wine too. “
“Oh, wait, did I chop up a load of tomatoes and add those? Yes, I did, I can see it on the picture”
“We also had garlic bread”
“We didn’t home make that”
Look, this is a recipe for pasta, not for the actual meal we had. If you want that sort of thing you’ll have to listen to a chef or a recipe blog. But anyway, here’s a picture of the finished meal. It was flat out delicious, the best pasta I’ve had in my life, and we didn’t fall out once.
Go make pasta, at least once, it’s well worth giving it a go, and also look:
