Semi-Semolina Pasta

My friends came over when I got my pasta rollers last year to break them in, and I've been trying to perfect my recipe and technique since then.  Last night we had our best success ever, due to a combination of understanding how the roller / cutters work as well as fine-tuning the recipe.  It turns out that once you recognize the physics behind the pasta, you can prevent terrible things from happening in its manufacture.

We made what my friend kept calling 'salmonella pasta', which was in reality 'semolina pasta', but hey - what's in a name?  Semolina is the type of flour typically used for pasta - it's the hardest of all wheat strains you'll find, with a high protein content making it suitable for turning into a delicious, stretchy dough for pasta and pizza.  It's also yellow, which is strange the first time you see it.  Turn over a box of most grocery store pasta, and you'll see very few ingredients - semolina flour almost universally, durum flour, and a few other additives.  That's it - no eggs, nothing magical.  I happen to have a 50 pound bag of semolina flour for no other reason than curiosity, so I'm always eager to find ways to use it up.  Also, the pasta I made has eggs in it, so expect another write-up soon comparing the egged and eggless variants. 

I've been adjusting the ratio of semolina flour to all-purpose flour that I put into the pasta, since recipes tend to vary wildly on this issue.  It might be useful to start with some overview of my previous pasta making experiences, in the order in which they occurred:

1. Used all-purpose flour, pasta ended up being fairly bland.  Also made a terrific mess when I ran it through the cutters, since everything stuck together.  I also overcooked it, and it came out mushy - like cafeteria pasta.
2. Similar recipe, I think I added more salt and a touch of semolina flour, maybe 1/4 of the total flour.  Same manufacturing problems, and probably the same cooking problems.  The taste was a little less boring, though.
3. All semolina flour.  Taste = great.  In manufacture I had quite a few problems, not because the dough was too sticky, but because it was like a brick.  This led to some poor kneading which almost broke my mixer, and made it difficult to run through the rollers into pasta sheets.  Semolina has a very coarse grind, so using just this resulted in a very strange dough ball that I had to go three rounds with to get ready for rolling.  The final flavor was unbelievably good, though.
4. Most recent recipe, using a 50/50 approach.  My favorite of all the mixes so far, for reasons explained below.

I will note again that these all had eggs in them.  Actually, until I started doing research a few minutes ago, I thought store pasta like Barilla had eggs in it too.  I guess that's what "egg noodles" are, when compared to traditional pasta.  I'm sure Marco Polo is rolling over in his grave somewhere.

When we made the pasta in the past, I just charged through the process, going from a partially kneaded dough to rollers to cutters to pot within about 60 minutes.  This is not the way to excellent pasta, and so I do things quite a bit differently now.  Start to finish, you're looking at 2 - 2.5 hours for a good homemade pasta, although hands-on time is much less.

And now, a word about equipment.  Here's what I used to do this, with links for this stuff in case you don't know how to use the internet.

• A KitchenAid stand mixer, to incorporate the dough and then do most of the kneading.
• The pasta roller attachment for the stand mixer, which I consider to be an essential component.  You could do this by hand, or with a standalone roller, but if it's not powered, I think you need at least two people to prevent mangling the incoming and outgoing dough.  If you're not excited about paying $120 to try this experiment and already have a KitchenAid, you can buy just the pasta roller attachment on its own, which isn't a bad way to go - it's referred to as KPSA by KitchenAid.  It's the best part of the roller / cutter set, which is referred to as KPRA.
• The fettuccine cutter attachment to the stand mixer, which takes the dough sheets to their final shape.
• A pasta drying rack, although I'm still more a fan of using a broom handle suspended between two counters as a stand-in for this.
• A 1+ gallon pot, large enough to boil what you need.  I used a 3 gallon last night.
• Lots of counter space.
• Plastic wrap
• A bench cutter to cut and work with the dough.  It's basically a large metal scraping tool.

Before describing the recipe, I will say that the two biggest things that have to be understood when making pasta are that it requires drying or resting in between steps for a variety of reasons, and that the cutters can really mangle your pasta if you don't have it prepared properly, meaning dried and a little floured.  On my first attempt at using them, the cutters took in a beautiful sheet of pasta and gave me back a sticky, gnarled mess of spaghetti that took a long time to salvage.  So take heed of some of the extra details if you want success.

Semolina Egg Fettuccine

ingredient list from Fresh Semolina and Egg Pasta at AllRecipes, with my instructions

Prep time: 1.5 - 2 hours
Hands-on time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 2 minutes

Easily serves 6-8, depending on how much everyone loves your sauce

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups semolina flour
• 1 pinch salt
• 6 large eggs
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine all ingredients.  Using the paddle attachment, stir for 30-60 seconds to incorporate all ingredients.  Switch to dough hook and knead for 5-8 minutes, with the time depending on if your mixer sounds like it's going to die at any moment, which mine does.  Remove dough and place on a lightly floured counter.  Knead by hand for 1-2 minutes, folding in half like a wallet, then rotating 90 degrees and repeating.  You should be left with a slightly tacky ball that looks smooth.  Place back in mixer bowl and cover with saran wrap or a clean towel, to prevent surface from drying.  Let stand for 20-30 minutes (this step allows the gluten to rest, so the dough will roll out more easily).

Once the dough is rested, divide it into 6 equally sized pieces.  Keeping the resting pieces under plastic or a towel to prevent drying, grab the first section of dough and shape by hand into a thin rectangle with a tapered end that can get into the rollers.  Set up whatever rolling device you use, and feed the dough through once.  Now, take this long sheet and fold it back in half, so it's the same width but double the thickness.  Feed the folded dough back through the rollers, folded edge first, to compress back into a thin sheet (this step kneads the dough further, and gives you nice edges, a well incorporated consistency, and a smooth finish that will make the rest of the rolling go more smoothly).  Repeat this step at least 3 times total, until you are comfortable with what's coming out.

The pasta sheets as they are being thinned.  Notice the smoothness as well as the clean edges.  This was a properly kneaded dough, using good flour

Decrease the roller spacing gradually (on the KitchenAid rollers you just click down from 1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc.) until you have your desired thickness.  Don't fold the dough to knead it further after you're past the first thickness setting, just run it through and move on or you may overload the rollers.  I go to '4' for fettuccine and spaghetti on my rollers.

Now comes a patience step.  On a floured countertop, place the sheet down and let it dry.  Don't forget the flour or the sheet will become a permanent part of your counter, which you'll one day market as a unique selling feature of your kitchen.  Then, sprinkle flour onto the upper surface of the sheet, and rub it around so it's got a good coating.  This will greatly facilitate cutting in the next step.  I flipped my sheets over about 5-10 minutes into this drying step, which seemed to be a good idea since the bottoms weren't as dry as the top at the time.

Some sheets of dough resting on the counter.

Repeat this whole rolling and resting process with all remaining balls of dough.  You may have a lot of counter space occupied by the end.  Another option would be to hang the sheets, but I'm not sure how you would flour them while they're hanging.  It would speed the drying, though.

After letting the sheets dry on the counter for 20 minutes (no more, or they'll be too brittle), prepare your cutting device.  This could be as simple as a pizza cutter, or maybe you're making ravioli and you're not cutting at all, but I used the KitchenAid fettuccine cutter.

Run the sheets through the cutter, being prepared on the other end for complete chaos.  This is really hard with one person, and arguably difficult with two, but it's probably the most fun you will ever have in the kitchen.  In addition to the long fettuccine strips, little bits of pasta are going to come off the edges and drop on the floor, making a mess.  Meanwhile, you've got to feed the sheet in straight, or it will either start folding up into the rollers, or it can get it all cockeyed, resulting in pasta noodles that aren't all the same length, which show up and disappear out of some of the cutter openings below as you try to realign the sheet above.  There's just no way to keep catching all the pasta if you don't feed it in straight, so keep practicing until you get this part down.

Running the sheets through the cutter.  Notice the good amount of flour on there - this really helps keep things from sticking.

Try to grab the pasta with your hand and forearm, so you can easily transfer it to your drying rack.  Make sure you separate all the strands from each other, or they will stick and not cook evenly.  This is where flouring the sheet surfaces earlier really comes in handy - the strands shouldn't have stuck to each other that much, giving you a fighting chance to collect individual noodles that don't need as much separating.

Pasta drying.  We used the whole pasta rack and my big spoon.  I would advocate a dowel or broom handle to anyone trying to get started.

Semi-semolina fettuccine noodles.  I couldn't have hoped for a better result.

Now, another patience step - let the pasta dry!  You can't overdry the pasta, but you can sure as heck ruin it by cooking too soon, where the pasta will basically turn into instant porridge when it hits the boiling water.  Relax, have a glass of red wine, and start your water boiling.  From the moment you put the pasta on the racks, you have 3 options:

1. Let dry for 30-60 minutes.  Cook pasta for once you're satisfied with how dry it is.
2. Let hang until fully dried, multiple hours.  Not sure how you'd package this, but you're left with something you can hang onto for a while (except for the eggs).  If you do this, be prepared to cook it for longer than 1-2 minutes.
3. Let dry for 15-20 minutes, then remove noodles while still pliable but starting to dry.  Toss them in a bit more flour, then gather them up into little bundles and store in plasticware in the fridge.  Now you'll have pasta very similar to refrigerated store pasta, which only takes 1-2 minutes to cook whenever you are ready.  I kept mine for up to a week last time, and it cooked up great and didn't clump in the fridge because of the flouring.

I went with the first option, and we cooked the pasta in a large pot for a couple of minutes.  In the past, I've cooked it for 60 seconds and it was done.  Last night it took 2.5 minutes, since we put in too much and the water temperature dropped below boiling.  In 5 minutes your pasta will be ruined, unless it was bone dry when you started.

Some words on cooking.  First, use a lot of water.  On store pasta directions, they say 4 quarts of water to cook a box for a reason - it's to keep enough thermal mass in there that when you add the pasta, the water continues boiling.  This is even more important with homemade pasta, where overcooking can happen much quicker.  Second, salt the water with a good amount of salt - maybe 1 tbsp or more per gallon - and do it right before you throw in the pasta.  If you put the salt in too early, you actually raise the boiling temperature of the water rather than just seasoning the water, which isn't what you're going for.  Third, don't be a silent partner when you cook the pasta.  You have to let the pasta tell you when it's done - take a bite every 30 seconds or so, and you'll have all the information you need.  Is it still hard in the center?  Is it a little chewy?  Is it like eating a bowl of hospital oatmeal?  If it's the last option, you overcooked it.  If it's the second, that's al dente (Italian for 'to the tooth'), meaning it's done.  If it's not done, give it another 30 seconds and test again.  After all, why go to all the trouble of making this from scratch, if you're not going to cook it right?

As soon as the pasta is done, immediately transfer to a colander, and try to reserve 1-2 cups of the cooking water if you can.  You can use this to bind the pasta with whatever sauce you use, if it turns out to be too dry.  Don't rinse your pasta, don't shake your pasta.  Just dump it out, grab however much you're going to serve that night, and put it back in the empty cooking pot.  Take whatever sauce you're going to use and toss the pasta in that, potentially adding some of the cooking water if it sounds wrong when you toss it.  Trust me, you'll know what I'm talking about when it happens.

And that's it!  Start to finish, I think it took about 2 hours to make this batch, and I thought it came out great.  The mix of regular and semolina flour yields a good amount of pasta flavor with a dough that is very easy to work with.  You may want to omit the eggs from your recipe, or switch to a different flour, or add other things like spinach or beet juice.  To that I say - go for it!  The process will be basically the same, just remember to rest the dough, use the right amount of flour, and dry your pasta sufficiently for proper cooking, where cooking should be an active process.  You don't need a fancy stand mixer or attachments, although they make a huge difference, and you don't even need any special ingredients.  But you do need to understand what you're doing, and look at this as a fun experiment, hopefully a social one, that can either be rewarding or infuriating.  I hope it's the former.

The finished product, tossed with sauce.  It's a family recipe, not sure yet if I'm going to post it at a later date.

The Meat Goes On

And on, and on.  I probably should have thought this through, because now I have 4 pounds of beef that's going bad, with increasingly less desire to eat it.  Last night was a decent steak salad, but I think I was forcing it.  The avocado was probably the best part of the whole experience.

I tried a new approach to the slicing, making sure to orient the roast so I was slicing against the grain.  This makes the resulting slices much more tender, since you're not gnawing on long muscle bits but rather a whole bunch of shorter fibers.  And if you didn't want to think about meat that way, sorry for ruining the mystique, but it's true.  Another good discovery was that if you look behind the blade to see what's coming out, you can control the speed a lot better, and get much more even slices that don't fall apart in the blade.  So I got a big tub of fresh sliced meat, ready to be made into sandwiches.  Now all I need is motivation to eat them.

Thin-cut, delicious looking homemade roast beef.  And this is just half of it!

Slices can get pretty thin once you know how to work the slicer

Anyway, salad recipe below.

Steak Salad
 

• 1/4 pound top round, sliced 1/4" thick and cut into strips
• 2 cups spring greens
• 1/2 tomato
• 1/2 avocado
• 1/4 red onion
• 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 tbsp balsamic vinegar (good stuff, please - otherwise you're not getting the full experience)
• Sea salt and cracked black pepper

Prepare the greens, onion, and tomato.  Make sure the lettuce is dry, or else the salad dressing won't stick, and it's going to be a mess.  Slice avocado thinly just before plating, so it won't brown before you can get at it.

Toss greens, onion, and tomato with salt, pepper, oil and balsamic in a large bowl.  I find that the best way to do this is by hand, but only if nobody's watching.  A small bowl will result in greens on the table and on your shirt, so go big.  If you add the salt and dressing too early, the greens may wilt or lose their fresh taste - always dress your salad within a couple minutes of plating.

To serve, assemble the plate with all ingredients as you see fit.  Be creative!  Fan the avocado, or stand things up, or put everything in separate piles, or in a big tower.  If salads aren't fun to prepare, they're not going to be fun to eat, so enjoy it or you'll just be another one of those somber lettuce eaters, like a giraffe or the lonesome triceratops.

Steak salad.  Not bad, but I would normally prefer a different cut from top round here

Perfect Roast Beef

I ate some really bad meat the other day.  You know the kind - the 'turkey' you buy at the grocery store in the pre-sealed tubs.  But it's not turkey, it's some kind of loaf, and the ingredient list is longer than a graduate thesis.  I know how they get it - they take meat trimmings, grind them up, and then cook them slowly in a mold, letting the proteins coagulate into a kind of 'meat brick'.  But I'd rather be building houses with these things than eating them; the consistency isn't right, and you don't really know what you're eating.  This is why hot dogs and I don't get along - don't bother digging into what those things are made out of if you plan to keep eating them.  Also, just because we CAN make something doesn't mean we should.  So I'm taking a stand - I'm making my own deli meats.

Boom.  Homemade roast beef bagel sandwich.

As part of my 'you can do it yourself' mania, I decided recently that I needed to buy a deli slicer.  Like the ones at the grocery store, but probably less safe.  You know, one of these things:

My new finger / meat slicer

Like an addiction, I can't seem to get these ideas out of my head until they're done, so now here I am, proud owner of a meat slicer.  So now I've got this thing, and together we're going to draw a line in the sand at the deli counter and say "no!  I'm not eating meat where I can't see muscle fibers any more!  I'll start my own deli, at home, with more alcohol and better television".  And that's how we convinced ourselves to buy a meat slicer.

I bought a 4.5 pound beef roast, top round, choice cut - nothing fancy.  Granted, roast beef is typically one of the meats in the deli that actually is a real cut of meat, but I'm starting there anyway.  At least this way I know exactly what other ingredients went into my lunch meats - beef, and nothing else.  And to kick this adventure off right, I roasted it according to a new recipe my mom found for me in Saveur #137.  The idea is to get a roasted hunk of meat that looks just like the deli's cuts - red all the way to the edges, instead of your usual gray outer ring with a bit of red in the center.

2014-01-26 update: I'm updating this recipe to my own modified version, which gets even better results and employs the time-honored tradition of 'thinking about what you are doing before you actually start', which in this case required a couple of half-decent attempts and a working knowledge of thermodynamics.

Perfect Roast Beef

• Five pound roast, preferably top sirloin to avoid the need for tenderizing the meat
• Salt
• Pepper

Stage 1: Roasting

Season the roast with salt and pepper.  Take a large, heavy skillet, preferably cast iron, and heat it up dry,  getting it up not quite to smoking temperature, but pretty close.  You're going to sear this bugger on all sides, but do so in a very particular way.  What I mean is this: once the pan is hot, place the meat in the pan on one of its faces.  Leave it there for a few minutes, then take it out of the pan completely, and rest it on a plate.  Now let the pan get rocket-hot again, and repeat this process with a fresh face of the meat.  Why are we doing this, you ask?  Because we want the surface of the meat to be perfectly browned as an artifact of the delicious maillard reaction, which, like caramelization, develops complex flavor profiles (and does not "sear in the juices", as was debunked by Alton Brown on Good Eats), and we want to do it quickly.  The first time I tried this, I got a nicely browned outside, but it took longer than I wanted to, as the cool meat hitting the pan caused fluctuations in the pan surface temperature, which in turn had to keep heating up to searing temperature over a longer period of time in contact with the meat.  If one could reduce the time that the meat is being exposed to very high temperatures, which can somewhat substantially penetrate into the core of the roast, one could ensure that the browning of the meat would not get in any further than the outermost shell of the meat.  Look, it's hard to explain without a diagram, a series of videos, and a number of formulas, so just take my word for it.  Sear, remove, pause, repeat until browned on all sides.

I call this "meat mountain"

Look at how thin the depth of penetration of heat is into the meat.  Brown on the outermost 1/32", and then just starting to turn for the next 1/8"- 1/4".  Let's see what this looks like once fully cooked.

Now, place the quickly browned roast on a rack in a roasting pan in the oven and cook at 200 degrees (F) for 3 hours 20 minutes, until a probe thermometer in the center reads 130 degrees**.

**Raw meat alert: if you are the meat police, or know them, you are fully aware that all meat should be cooked to above 145 degrees to kill off harmful E. Coli bacteria and other food-bourne illnesses (I'm serious - see the Beef: It's What's for Dinner official guidance).  But if you want to eat good meat, you probably ignore this all the time and realize that whole muscle cuts can be cooked to pretty much whatever temperature you like, and you're probably going to be fine 99% of the time.  And come on, look at that guy in the video!  Who are you going to trust, him or me?

This is not a fast process.  Expect a cool 5 pound roast to take about 2.5 hours to fully come up to temperature.  On the upside, the place is going to smell like the best local deli restaurant kitchen you've  ever eaten at, and it's going to do so for the better part of the day.

After the final side is seared

Temperature once pulled: 130 deg F.  This is from my 2013 attempt

Stage 2: Slicing

The slicer works!  While I'm no expert in carvery, I was able to put whole meat in one and get sliced meat out the other, which is always a good thing.  Plus, I retained all my fingers.  Also, the roast beast came out looking impressive, and after one iteration came out perfectly.  I'll show pictures from both attempts.  Even on the first attempt, it was red almost all the way out to the edges, which is a first for me.  Photos below - thickness can get down to maybe 1/16" - 1/8" before it starts to disintegrate, but that's adequate for my kind of sandwiches.  You have to vary the speed with which you slide the meat past the blade as you adjust the thickness, which is an art that I will probably never be able to master.

The roast beast, 2011 attempt

Locked and loaded

Here's what an almost perfectly roasted cut of beef should look like... (2011)

And here's what a completely perfect roast looks like (2013).  The difference - pausing between searing each side, allowing the pan to come to temperature.  There's about 1/4" ring of meat that is kept more red and more moist by this method.

Another look at the improved method (2013)

Savoring the sliced meat on a bagel sandwich (2013)

Like the Seinfeld tip calculator: it does other things!

I had lunch and dinner plans the day of this experiment, but I was so eager to try the product that I made a breakfast roast beef sandwich.  Another valuable lesson learned - a breakfast beef sandwich is gross.  But it did give me an opportunity to see what else can be sliced well, such as tomatoes and onions.  Bonus.

Welcome to Global Grub

I've been cooking for about 15 years, making a mix of international foods, regional foods, strange snack foods, foods you probably should never make for yourself.  Things like bacon, marshmallows, pickles, cheese, and beer.  Foods from Cambodia, Morocco, Cuba, and Iceland.  To be fair, people make these things all the time - they just don't make them all.  Whenever I meet someone from another culture, I will inevitably ask them "so, what do you eat there?"  This has helped me to expand my knowledge of dishes, spices, and recipes.  And before I experience complete digestive failure from refusing to let my stomach have a steady diet, I'm going to post as many of my findings and experiments as possible.

I've set up this blog in the hopes that more people learn to cook through my experiences or, at the very least, that people will be less scared of the kitchen.  I'll try to be informative, drawing on authors and cooks like Mark Bittman, Harold McGee, Irma Rombauer, and little bits of information I picked up from friends, chefs, TV shows, and magazines over the past 10 years or so.  I will cite the appropriate sources when possible, and although I do tend to follow the CASE (copy and steal everything) method, sometimes I'll actually adapt a recipe to suit my tastes or techniques.

Armed with my sausage stuffer, pasta rollers, and other assorted kitchen gadgets, I'm going to keep making new dishes and posting the results for the world to see.  Perhaps this will just be for me and my friends, as a reference guide.  Or perhaps this blog can be something greater - a site for those who wish to learn about essential dishes of other cultures, or long-lost ways of preparing your own foods from scratch.  I don't know yet, but I'll keep posting if readers keep stopping by.