A few weeks ago, I wrote my list of COVID cooking barrels. I have one more thing there: making fresh pasta.
I have been thinking about it for a while. In fact, a few years ago, we bought a hand-cranked noodle machine in the yard at a cheap price. When the bugs on my head were used to make fresh pasta, my husband (bless his heart) dug out the machine.
The first part is very simple: flour, eggs (yes, room temperature, so you have to wait an hour to reach temperature), oil and salt in the food processor, pulse for 10 seconds, and then cut into cutting boards. Ignore the piece that fell on the floor; the rest worked fine. I fixed it, and with the help of my sous chef, it was rubbed. We wrap it with plastic wrap and let it do what it should do.
During the whole process, one smart thing we did was to cut the ball into four pieces and then wrap the three pieces.
I realized that I needed to spread the dough. As me, I am going to pick up a bottle of wine. My more patient sous chef has been looking for our rolling sticks, and I believe this is the last use in the 90s.
A piece of dough flattened, my husband carried the crank, and I started feeding it into the trough. At the beginning, we were very excited. With each rolling and twisting of the dial, it becomes longer and thinner.
That was when we realized that we had no plan to manage this kind of pasta. It is about 4 feet long and we don’t know what to do. We tried to cut the design and realized that the long angel hair was too wiggly to be used, and we didn’t know what to do next.
We tried to hang them on the cutting board and then turn them into thick pieces. We tried to hang them on the new air fryer basket, but it was too low. We support the basket on the lower part of the machine and it works slightly.
I searched the kitchen quickly and found a towel rack hanging in front of the sink. We tethered it to the handle of the oven to figure out that it would give us some hanging space.
Try the second method: we roll out a smaller piece and feed it through angel hairpins. He cranked, and I fed the dough, trying to figure out how we were going to grab the thread. I grabbed a large bowl and placed it in the drawer under the noodle maker on the edge of the cabinet. The fragments fell in and clumped together.
I passed the dough through the machine again, and then gave the task to my husband so that he can thread the thread and crank, and when they go through, I can (lightly) grab the wire harness. My hands gently lifted them up and picked them up-watching half pop out of the other end of the slot and quickly fall to the floor.
I walked to the right and took the wire harness to our temporary drying equipment, losing the wire harness every inch.
But a few works did it, and we are very proud of ourselves. We made homemade pasta. Okay, there are about 10 lines from the machine to the drying rack, but this is just the beginning.
We try again in the second quarter. This time, we tried to reduce the pressure of the roller to 7 and it was suppressed. Well, we will only go to six o’clock.
We also made a piece of paper and tried to make ravioli (we have enough dough to hold five ravioli) filled with leftover sauce from a local Mexican restaurant. Why the remaining dipping sauce? Because it’s there, of course.
My husband asked if I sealed the dough with water. Of course not, I answered. I took the fork and pressed the edges like a pie, but we thought they would explode the moment they hit boiling water.
Half of the macaroni dough still remains, but the kitchen is a disaster. There was a bunch of dry angel hair in the air fryer basket, debris all over the kitchen counter, and debris from the other end of the floor.
As I said, this seems to be the old “I Love Lucy” episode, using pasta dough instead of chocolate.
We start with wontons. I told my husband that we should see them floating to know when they are ready. We gently put one of them down, and then quickly popped to the surface. The content of this test is too much.
We put all five in the water, waited for two minutes (until the dough slightly changed color), and then took out one for testing (then we realized why we had to make five when we were two: one was a tester).
Okay, sausage and cheese may not be the best choice, that is, boiled wontons, but they pass without exploding, so we call it a proof of concept. Next time, I think we can try cooking in an air fryer instead.
Since we don’t have to bother to find out how to store fresh pasta (there are four small angelic nests), we throw them all into the water.
After a minute, we fished out of the water and transferred them to the sauce. We added some pasta water to the sauce because this is what the TV chef did.
This is the softest and freshest pasta we have ever eaten. There are too many things on the plate, but we eat until we are full.
Therefore, there is another thing on the COVID cooking list (Half of the dough is made into spaghetti after a few days. Although it grabs our drying rack, the effect is not as good as angel hair.) One: We forgot Clean the towel and put it under the shelf, and finally bury the beets on the carpet. Two: The machine did not cut completely, so we had to separate each thread by hand.
I think everyone is showing off cocoa bombs during Christmas. After all, we cannot make the bucket list empty.
Post time: Feb-07-2021