Hola! A recipe from me today. You can use fresh or dried pasta for it. Also, a reminder: My novel Ghost Chilli will be out 4 July 2024 in the UK.
For most of this week’s lunches, I ate dal out of a bag – which, in addition to horrifying my Indian colleagues, made me reminisce about the last time I properly cooked.
Between Christmas and New Years, I was overcome with the urge to get rid of a bag of pasta flour I’ve had for who knows how long. I even gave that bag to a friend, hoping she would take it off my hands, but she just used some and returned it back to me. No matter how much I used that flour (not to make pasta but to make anything else requiring flour), it never ended. It was like of those flour bags they made us dress up like babies and inconveniently lug around for a couple of weeks in high school – a measure to scare teen girls into not having sex. But somehow this flour baby was growing?
Anyway, that’s how I ended up spending six straight hours making pasta from scratch. And it was so enjoyable that I bought a new bag of pasta flour that I’ll probably ignore for several months.
I’ve made fresh pasta a few times, mostly for testing different pasta machines for work or taking cook school classes on the subject. (Borough Kitchen plug here.) Enough times to have learned that the ONLY thing you really need to know to nail fresh pasta is how the texture should feel after you knead the dough: smooth and elastic, enough that when you press the ball it will make a dent that slowly bounces back part of the way. Use whatever base recipe you have and add more flour if it’s too wet or more water if it’s too dry to get that jackpot texture. (For Missy Robbins’ all egg-yolk green dough from her lovely cookbook Pasta, I added some of those spare egg whites instead of water, until I got to that texture – the egg whites make the dough more pliable. You can use the leftover egg whites to make Vietnamese Pizza.) The wonderful thing about fresh pasta is that no matter how much you fuck it up, it still tastes nice in the end, thanks to sauce.
That’s the texture; notice the indent that hasn’t bounced back yet. Could have been smoother but it still worked.
Speaking of sauce: Cacio e pepe. I love how it’s both rich and austere at the same time. When I was in Rome nine years ago, I’d posted a (filtered, square) photo of spaghetti cacio e pepe to my Instagram grid, and my friend commented: ‘needs more peppe’. She was 100% right. It was cute but needed more pepe, enough pepe to clear your nasal passage in the way mustard or wasabi does. The key is to overdo it with pepper but NOT the salt – a mistake that made me avoid homemade cacio e pepe for two years. Tragically.
Fresh pasta on the left, dry pasta on the right. P.S. This does NOT work for ravioli or filled pasta; trust me.
My recipe, below, is adapted from Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, except I use butter instead of olive oil and add the cheese even more gradually, which I think is important (unless you want your sauce to look like egg drop soup). I also added lemon zest and, if needed at the end, juice, which keeps the salt in check. (I say this as someone who would marry salt if I could.) Does this take it out of cacio e pepe territory, and into al limone zone? Yes. Do we need to treat pasta recipes like nation states? No.
Fresh Pasta (or Not) with Cacio e ‘Needs More Peppe’ (& Some Lemon)
100–120g fresh pasta, or 80–100g dried pasta
30g–40g finely grated Pecorino Romano
Zest of a lemon
Butter, q.b.*
Salt and freshly ground pepper, q.b.
Pasta water, q.b.
*1/4 of the weight of your pasta is the ideal proportion imo
*q.b. is a very convenient acronym that stands for ‘quanto basta’ and means ‘as much as you want’. I like it because it’s shorter and more accurate than ‘to taste’ (since you are not tasting these ingredients before they are cooked)
Serves 1, scale up if you want
Set a pot of water to boil. Do not salt until it is boiling. When it’s time, add 2 tablespoons of salt and cook the pasta for 2-3 minutes if fresh, until it floats to the top. For dried pasta, cook it for 2-3 minutes less than the cooking time stated on the box.
Meanwhile, grate your Pecorino Romano, and the lemon zest over it. Mix together.
In a separate frying pan or saute pan, over low-medium heat, add enough butter to coat the bottom. Grate as much pepe as your heart desires over the butter. Add a ladle of the pasta cooking water to the butter and let it come to a boil. Then add the pasta, directly from the pot, to the butter-water mix using tongs (for long pasta) or a spider/slotted spoon (for shorties). (If you use a colander to drain that’s fine but just reserve the pasta water somewhere.) Gradually, and I mean gradually, add the Pecorino-lemon zest mixture and mix vigorously. Add more pasta water, one ladle at a time, if it’s not looking very saucy, and go back and forth like this until you have no Pecorino-lemon zest mixture left.
Taste: Add salt or pepe if needed. If it’s too salty, add some juice from the lemon you zested. If it’s too al dente, cook it for a bit longer, adding more pasta water and cheese (or butter) to make it more saucy. If it’s well past al dente, take it off heat immediately and adjust the seasoning on your plate.
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See you in a fortnight!
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