Handmade Egg Noodles Type Of Pasta With Cream

Fresh pasta takes practice to make well. This recipe aims to describe the process clearly, but ultimately, the only guarantor of success will be your own tactile experience. Mastering fresh pasta will teach you about the properties of gluten (the protein in wheat responsible for its elasticity), imparting an excellent dough sense that carries over to bread and pastry baking.

I always use a stainless-steel, hand-crank pasta roller device from Italy to make fresh pasta. Many Italian purists think the metal devices are rubbish, and that rolling out your dough on a wooden countertop with a wooden rolling pin is the only way to proceed, but I am neither Italian nor a purist. If you want to roll these out with a rolling pin, by all means try it is possible, but it takes work, patience, and space.

If you go to the trouble of making fresh pasta, you dont want a complex sauce to overwhelm it. These wide noodles are wonderful underneath braised chicken or beef stew. But I think I like them best on their own, just with cream. Since this is an extremely simple (which is different from easy) recipe, you ll get great results if the ingredients are of good quality. At Deep Springs we are lucky to have good farm fresh eggs to make the noodles and our astonishingly thick, aromatic farmhouse cream to sauce the noodles.

Its that simple: no cheese, no onion, no garlic, no parsleyâEUR¦ just cream, a little butter, salt, and pepper.

EQUIPMENT
Hand crank pasta rollerpizza cutter
NOODLES
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, preferably unbleached1/2 teaspoon olive oil2 large eggs1 egg yolk1 to 2 teaspoons water (only if necessary)semolina flour for dusting (if unavailable, use all purpose flour)
SAUCE
1 1/4 cups heavy (whipping) cream1/4 teaspoon salt, plus more as needed2 tablespoons butterfreshly ground black pepper
DIRECTIONS
To make the noodles, before beginning to mix, bear in mind that pasta dough is much denser and more resilient than bread dough. In a sturdy mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, using its slowest speed, or by hand in a medium bowl using a wooden spoon, mix the flour and olive oil together for a moment, then add the eggs and yolk. The mixture will at first appear dry and crumbly. Keep mixing until it becomes more uniform. If it still seems too dry, add just enough water a few drops at a time for the dough to begin to cohere. You should need no more than a teaspoon or, if your flour is especially dry or your eggs small, two. The dough should not be so wet that it comes together in a ball by itself in the mixer, only moist enough that when you take a handful of the crumbles and squeeze they stick together readily. If theres too much water, the noodles will be sticky and flabby. Dont overwork the dough it will make the pasta tough. Wrap the dough well in plastic wrap and let it rest at room temperature for 1 to 2 hours.

Divide the dough into 4 pieces, each slightly bigger than a golf ball. Keep the pieces you are not using well wrapped. Take a piece of the dough and flatten it with your hand. If it seems sticky, dust it well with semolina flour. Using a hand crank pasta machine, roll the dough first through the thickest setting. You will have an oval shaped piece of dough. Fold this in thirds to make a square-shaped piece of dough, and run it through the rollers again at the thickest setting. Roll the dough through successively thinner settings until it is about as thick as 4 or 5 sheets of paper. Some cooks like to roll out each ball of dough partway and then let them rest, well covered, before rolling them through the thinnest setting. If your dough is soft and would rather stick than not, keep it well coated with flour at all times and hope for the best. If your dough is hard, has lots of white streaks, and tends to crumble and break, try misting it lightly with water before reflouring and rerolling. If your dough is elastic but firm, with a silky suppleness to it, and if it rolls out easily with only a slight crack here and there, you have made perfect pasta dough.Before cutting all the noodles, make a test batch: take a sharp pizza cutter (or a knife) and cut a few inch wide crosswise strips, slightly on the diagonal, from your sheet of pasta. Boil up a small pot of salted water and cook these noodles for 20 to 30 seconds. Drain the noodles well and turn them out onto a plate. If they fall completely flat, tear easily, and seem insubstantial, the dough has been rolled too thin this can be remedied somewhat by reducing the boiling time. If they look thick and sturdy and taste tough and chewy, the dough is too thick roll it thinner. If the noodles stand up nicely on the plate and taste good, with just the right balance of tenderness and firmness, they are just right. Proceed with rolling the other 3 pieces of dough, keeping any dough you are not handling at the moment covered with plastic wrap so it does not dry out. Cut all the noodles into 1-inch-wide strips with your pizza cutter, as described previously. Toss them with extra semolina flour and place them in loose clumps on a floured tray or baking sheet. Dont pile them heavily on top of each other. Keep the noodles on this tray, covered with a dish towel or with plastic wrap, refrigerated, until just before cooking-serving time. To make the sauce and cook the noodles, pour the cream into a wide skillet, add the salt, and set over a low flame to warm. Bring a large pot of water (about 1 1/2 gallons) to a furious boil. Add enough salt to the water so that it tastes lightly salty, and throw in the noodles all at once. Gently stir them around in the pot. Once the water returns to a boil, the noodles should take only about a minute to cook to test, taste one. Drain well (dont rinse), and transfer the noodles to the skillet with the warmed cream, adding the butter, cut into small pieces, and salt and pepper to taste. Raise the flame to medium-high, and toss gently to coat. Taste for salt. Divide the pasta and sauce among wide, shallow bowls. Twist a little more black pepper over each, and serve immediately.