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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Fresh Pasta and Bread

Well, it started out as a sourdough starter for waffles, then it became pizza dough, and finally, it became bread. Tasty, tasty bread, with a nice sour touch and excellent texture. I also made some pasta, hand-cut spaghetti, with a combination of semolina and AP flour.

Pasta Dough:
1/2 cup each stone ground semolina flour and King Arthure AP flour
1 T white pepper (I used the very aromatic Phu Quoc Pepper form Vietnam)
1 large egg
1 T warm water
1T extra virgin olive oil
I use the standard method of creating a pile of flour with a well in the middle. I blend the egg, water and olive oil into a slurry, which I then dump into the well and use a fork to combine the liquid and flour. This makes a soft dough that need to be wrapped and chilled for 1 hour. The dough puck comes out like this.
From here, I hand rolled to half as thick as the puck, folded and rolled again. Repeated this process 4 times, each time getting thinner until I was about 1/10 of an inch thick. It is best to let the dough rest halfway through the process, makes working it a lot easier. Then I cut the pasta into strips. They are a little uneven, I call it rustic.
I hang and dry the pasta for 30 minutes to let the pasta cure a bit. This improves the texture of the pasta. From here, into boiling water for 5 minutes, then into a simple marinara of canned San Marzano tomatoes, fresh celery, garlic and onions. Lots of olive oil to 'fry' the sauce and then the pasta to thicken.

The bread dough was left over from the pizza making process of Sunday. I used my Dutch oven to create a moist environment. The oven and Dutch Oven were preheated to 350F for 30 minutes, the Dutch Oven is well-seasoned, but, I decided to brush a little more oil into the DO. The dough was then just dumped from the bowl.
This was baked for 40 minutes covered in the DO, then 10 minutes uncovered, pulled and rested for 1 hour. Here is the finished loaf sliced up. The texture was absolutely nailed, tender crumb, crisp delicate crust, a light airy loaf with just a touch of souring.
The final product, pasta and bread, with a little olive oil drizzled on the bread.  This was a lovely fresh dinner.

2 comments:

  1. Bread and pasta from scratch eh? Very nice. I like the idea of the white pepper in the bread! Please tell me there was RedBoat in that Red Sauce...

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  2. To be honest, I don't recall what exactly I did to that sauce. I do need to do something with Red Boat soon, but, I want to do something really interesting.

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