Wow! Look at my Food Connect box this week. What a crazy amount of delicious food. Yummo.
After a long day on Friday I came home to find Morgan had made fresh pasta. he had seen all our tomatoes and decided to make bolognese!
Fresh pasta
6 eggs
Approx. 550g plain flour (fine flour if you have it)
1 tsp salt
Makes 8 serves
Morgan's method is precise (as always). He says: Knead the crap out of it until it goes 'delish' (approx. 5-min). You will notice that the dough transitions from a thing made out of flour and eggs, to a cohesive, moldable, tangible stuff. When it does that, keep kneading for a bit and put it aside for 1/2 hour minimum. Roll out using a pasta roller into flat sheets, lay them out to dry for a bit, then feed them through a pasta maker to make spaghetti!
Hang the strands to dry on your foldable laundry thingie!
Bolognese sauce
Cook 1kg mince until liquid is gone. Add 1/2 cup wine and cook until the liquid is gone. Add 4 cloves garlic, 3 finely chopped onion & olive oil. Cook, but don't brown the onions. Add Italian herbs and a couple of bay leaves (I threw in some rosemary too). Add 1kg fresh tomatoes + 2 cans of chopped tomatoes blended.
Bring to the boil and then simmer for 1.5hrs with the lid off. We added a little tomato paste 1 tbsp brown sugar, some balsamic vinegar and salt to taste. It's a process of adjusting flavours to suit the palate.
Serve over fresh pasta (3min in boiling water).
I added some Barambuh fetta, spring onions and chopped olives to serve.
When I grew up in Sydney in the 1980s, we ate 'spag bol' quite often. I remember the Parmesan cheese from a long-life can sprinkled on top and the crappy boxed pasta underneath. I love the emotions and memories that come from smell. Cooking this dish certainly takes me straight back to my youth. Not a huge surprise because smell is the only sense to connect directly to consciousness without being mediated by the thalamus. Thus, our experiences and memories are most quickly retrieved through smell. For more on olfaction see my memory blog entries on olfaction.
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Looks fabulous!
ReplyDeleteI've done the trick with the clothes-horse as well (me and a friend made a pasta dish for an 80-person SCA feast). Works just fine. For smaller amounts, the handles of wooden-spoons are fine, as is a piece of thick dowel.
Technique/recipe seems spot-on too (well, so say I, and my Nana agrees *nods*).
My rule of the thumb is 100g flour and one large egg per serve, but keep a bit of flour in reserve so you can adjust the moisture content. (I wouldn't know how much less flour to use with small/medium eggs.) Some people say to reduce the amount of egg and include water or oil but they are HEATHEN SCUM. :-P
Kneed until you can feel that glutenous transition; five mins is about right...and it's fun to play with. :)
Some people say wait as long as an hour but there's practically no difference over waiting 30 mins. It's an important chemical process and can't be skipped. If you need something to kill that time, it's when you make a sauce to go with the pasta. :)