Fresh Pasta

I have decided to try my hand at making pasta... and to become proficient at it. The inspiration behind this challenging enterprise comes from Bill Buford and a passage that I was reading in his book Heat, (An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker, Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany).

... and the passage that got me thinking was Buford's mastering of tortellino. As he tells it, "each infinitesimal tortellino takes a long time to make, and during the whole delicate process I found myself always on edge, hoping against hope that I wouldn't crush the fuckers. (I crushed many fuckers). And, given how little time it takes to eat the pint-sized little bastards, you come away with an understanding what they are: munchkin food made by people with a lot of time on their tiny hands." Of course, Buford's pasta-making skills came after several weeks studying alongside an elderly Italian lady who'd been making pasta since she was twelve and had taught Mario Batali much of what he knows.... according to her.

Of late, I have been doing a lot with pasta. Last night, as an accompaniment to a slow roasted tenderloin, I made some ravioli stuffed with the shredded meat from some short ribs that had spent four hours earlier in the afternoon poaching in red wine with shallots and fresh herbs. At the end of their steam bath, after straining and separating out the fat, I reduced the 6 cups of poaching liquid to a quarter cup of intense dark molasses, which I drizzled on to the ravioli. It was very good.

But I can't help thinking that I am cheating. While I can easily conjure up some wonderful stuffings I am dependent upon locally made fresh pasta if I want to do anything fancy. So this morning after I read, for the second time, the story of Buford's faux-internship in Porretta, I made my pasta-pronouncement to my regular dining partner.

Now, I have to give her some credit here. When I made this declaration she had to be aware that if I carry through on it there are going to be many nights of swearing; our recently acquired beloved puppy is going to be taking refuge behind the coach (still unaccustomed as he is to my profane cooking outbursts); there is a reasonable possibility that the kitchen ceiling is going to be decorated with half-completed pasta dough; and more than one Saturday evening is going to end in marital un-bliss. But all she asked in response was how this aligned with my "Cooking ROI". To be honest, I did suspect that this question was an ingenious ruse.

For those of you who have been following this blog, you may recall a post from August 2005, The ROI of Cooking, in which I described the formula that I created to guide a Make versus Buy decision in the kitchen. Anticipating the clean-up (half-completed pasta is invariably sticky), time, and frustration against the cost and availability of some very good locally made pasta, the idea of making pasta was clearly running counter to my own ROI - and my regular dining partner was clearly making a pre-emptive strike. But then I think I owe it to myself to constantly challenge what gives me satisfaction in the kitchen - and thereby recalculate the ROI.
So with that in mind I am going to start my pasta crusade. I have a colleague at work who regularly makes his own pasta. Over a bottle of wine he hand kneads the dough, folding, stretching and cutting, draping the sfoglia over kitchen chairs while his two young children run around doing God-Knows what two young children do - the imagination shudders. If he can accomplish this then surely I can master tortollino. A little profanity seems to me to be a small trade-off to the cost of two months in Italy learning at the side of a grandmotherly pastina in Porretta. Or perhaps that was the ingenious ruse.