In all my (very few) years of cooking, dough is one of the biggest unexplored frontiers for me. There’s something about all that rolling and kneading that just seems so… retro. It’s always fallen into the “above-and-beyond” category, cooking-wise (as in, “You made your own bread? Did you also carve your own rolling pin and harvest your own wheat?“)
Plus, yeast? Seriously? Nuh uh. No way. Blech.
But then I discovered this recipe from The Pioneer Woman (technically it’s from her friend Pastor Ryan). It makes homemade pasta seem criminally simple. You just combine eggs and flour, mush it around for a bit, roll it out and cut it. What could go wrong?
I am nothing if not a culinary optimist.
Pastor Ryan’s easy-peasy instructions:
“Two eggs per one cup of flour. Make well in flour, crack in eggs, and slowly mix with hand. Knead by hand until dough becomes smooth and pliable, adding flour to the board as necessary. Let rest for a little while before rolling it out. I usually figure one egg per person to determine how much to make. Example: Two eggs and one cup of flour would make enough pasta dough for a dinner for two.”
So I dumped two cups of flour into a big bowl (I wanted to make enough to have leftovers) and made a little well in the middle of the pile, creating sort of a volcano-ey shape. Since I am constantly afraid of running into a bad egg, I couldn’t bring myself to crack the eggs right into the mixing bowl, so I cracked each one in a smaller bowl and scrambled it a bit before pouring into the mouth of the flour volcano.
Slowly mix with hand. That’s what the recipe says. So, with equal parts disgust and fascination, I swirled the eggs around a little in the flour. Not so bad. It was sticking to my hands a bit, but I figured that would stop once the rest of the flour got incorporated. Wrong. I was shortly thereafter wearing two sticky, beige gloves made of pasta dough that covered pretty much all of both hands. And left pretty much nothing in the bowl. I’d say maybe 25% of my time during this stage was spent actually kneading the dough–the rest was spent picking globs of pasta goo out of every crevice of my hands. I wish I could show you a picture of this horrifying scene, but my camera ran away screaming when it saw me coming.
At some point I decided I’d had enough and plopped what I could scrape off my hands onto a cutting board. This was after realizing I should have floured the board before coating my hands in edible superglue (I ended up opening the flour canister with my elbows and dumping a little onto the board–and a lot onto the counter). As soon as I got most of the goop off my hands, I generously sprinkled more flour on top of the dough. This helped create a barrier between my skin and the Dough That Ate Pittsburgh so I could actually do some kneading.
And knead I did! For a loooong time. After I washed my hands and talked my camera down from the ledge, I took this lovely shot:
Why does it look like a flesh-toned brain?
Mmmm. I know I’m hungry.
Next came the rolling. At which point I remembered my total lack of a rolling pin. Good thing there’s a mostly-empty wine bottle on hand! At least it gave me an excuse to chug that last bit.
I’m glad I don’t have a dead Italian grandmother, because if I did she would be rolling over in her grave at the sight of her granddaughter making pasta on a red plastic cutting board using a wine bottle for a rolling pin. Ineptly.
I ended up having to split the dough into fourths to get it thin enough, because my cutting board and counter space wouldn’t allow for anything bigger.
When it came time for cutting, I went with the recommended pizza cutter. (I may not have a rolling pin, but by god I’ve got a pizza cutter!)
Wine bottle, pizza cutter, plastic cutting board. An elegant tableau.
Like how each noodle is a different width than the ones next to it? Yeah, hand-eye coordination was never my thing.
Tapewormalicious!
I boiled a big pot of generously salted water and plopped in these bad boys. They stuck together at first, but during the boiling process they started to come apart. Next I chopped up some parsley and oregano and threw that in with the drained pasta. There may have been some olive oil involved as well.
NOW it almost looks like food.
After all that, the sauce was almost an afterthought. I used a jar of prepared pasta sauce and spiced it up with some sauteed onions and garlic, diced tomatoes, wine, red pepper flakes, various fresh herbs and a little sugar. It was DELICIOUS. Must have been the sugar.
This must be that "plating" thing I've heard so much about.
My stomach is rumbling at the memory of this stuff. The texture was so unlike dried pasta–it was soft and chewy and delightful. The Frankenstein marinara was a little runny, but the pasta was good at absorbing the excess moisture. Who’da thunk this started out as flavorless glue?
THE FINAL, SUPER-OFFICIAL VERDICT
Difficulty: not too bad, but labor-intensive
Ingredients: simple as… something really simple
Messiness factor: off the charts
Level of deliciousness: sonnet-worthy
Bragging rights: huge
Figs, while insanely delicious, are little ticking time bombs. By the time they make it to your fridge, fresh figs generally have two days (at best) of usefulness left. Their incredibly short lifespan means most people never get a chance to work with fresh figs.
I know I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I saw 
