05 Mar 2024
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, finds herself embarking on a new culinary adventure…
It’s still chilly and unwelcoming enough outside to have us seeking the relative comfort of our warm kitchens. A weekend constitutional can be replaced with an afternoon cookery experimental, a spot of recipe-tweaking, or just a potter round the kitchen cupboards in search of whatever’s close to its use-by. And all guilt-free, because it’s wet and windy out anyway.
I particularly delight in this sort of weekend. Quite often, I’m catering at the weekends, whether for clients or friends, so the kitchen activity is structured and intense.
But sometimes there’s an empty schedule and I find myself embarking on culinary adventures based on either some ingredient glut (for example, the three large bags of red lentils I’d accidentally accumulated) or perhaps a kitchen gadget I’ve yet to try out.
One such gadget has been at the top of my list since I got it for Christmas. It’s a pasta-making machine. Now, I already have one of these and it’s well-loved and well-worn, frankly. I’d had a yearning for a new one all last year and my husband had not missed the subtle clues I’d carefully laid on the run-up to Christmas (such as: “Urgh, I really need a new one of these soon; the handle keeps falling out of its slot.”). Sure enough, one landed under the Christmas tree like clockwork.
The new machine has been waiting, boxed up, for a good couple of months now, pasta virginity intact and just waiting for me to pop its cherry tomato. I think the delay wasn’t merely due to lack of time or opportunity, but also a dose of apprehension over the wording on the box. This particular brand of pasta-making machine boasts an attachment for ravioli that has wavy edge-cutting rollers and a ‘hopper’ into which you spoon the filling for it to then fall into two layers of pasta. It all seemed very fancy and therefore potentially beyond me.
But I mustered some courage and unpacked the machine. Building it was the first battle, and reminded me of the challenges on the Krypton Factor back in the early ‘90s. Finally assembled, I got on with the culinary side of preparations.
My pasta dough needed to thaw: I tend to make it in bulk then freeze individual portions, which means I’m only ever a defrost in the microwave, a spin through the pasta machine and a dunk in boiling water away from fresh tagliatelle. This is my kind of life hack.
The filling – crab and ricotta – was so quick to make it felt somehow fraudulent: something so delicious could never be so simple, surely? It’s fair to say that, had I not gone down the buy-crab-in-a-handy-pot route, I might’ve felt less fraudulent,
but certainly also less smug, so on balance a victory. I contentedly mixed the crab meat with ricotta, lemon juice, salt, pepper and dill, then spooned it into the machine’s filling hopper. My excitement grew.
And then plummeted. The ravioli the machine made were neat as a pin, but the first batch were largely filled with air.
For the second batch, I deployed my husband to keep the handle turning while I topped the hopper up continuously and attempted to press down to encourage as much filling between the pasta sheets as possible.
This did produce slightly plumper ravioli, but the pasta–filling ratio was clearly too much weighted in favour of pasta and therefore, upon eating, not flavoursome enough.
I ended up using the rest of the pasta dough to make my usual larger, blousier, and overall more satisfactory ravioli, albeit with missing zigzag edging.
Filled pasta is great for entertaining, not only because the extra effort required scores highly on people’s appreciation scales, but also because you can make the pasta earlier on, cover it and refrigerate until just before sitting down to eat.
The cooking process is so fast and faff-free, especially if your sauce is made in advance too, and heated slowly to warm up before adding to the pasta.
Don’t make the mistake of heating your sauce with your ravioli already in it – they will overcook and probably come apart as you stir.
In fact, ravioli are often best dressed in herbed butter or sitting in a delicate broth, which then allows the filling to shine through.
I save the chunkier sauces for non-filled versions of pasta, such as my all-time favourite to make by hand: pappardelle.
Even the word is pleasing, stemming from the verb, ‘pappare’, which means to gobble up. Pappardelle are wider than their more common counterpart, tagliatelle, and so feel much more luxurious to eat and also look more impressive when served up.
All sauces suit them, too: from the standard Bolognese to a creamy mushroom sauce, or perhaps some chopped chorizo in chunky tomatoes and basil, pappardelle are the perfect vehicle for transporting flavour from plate to mouth.
Whether you’re using a machine or a rolling pin, make sure your dough is near to room temperature before working it, as it’ll be more pliable and break less.
When you’re working with one small batch, keep the other pieces covered to avoid drying out.
And my top tip of all is to care very little for precision when it comes to cutting pasta ribbons of any kind.
Perfectly precise lengths are for the factories, not our home kitchens.
There’s a rustic charm to a plateful of not-quite- identical pappardelle that, somehow, adds to the taste. I know that’s not logical, but call it the homemade touch. Happy pasta, everyone.
