Pasta Making with Ella

I’d like to introduce you to my niece Ella, and her fabulous Grade 1 assignment.  Oh, I am such a proud Aunt.

Anyway, the assignment was to document a pasta making day where I showed my sister Lindy, my cousin-in-law Olivia, and my nieces Catherine and Ella, how to make ravioli and tortellini.

All I can say is, I think I have a future food blogger on my hands!

So to expand on things a little further, my recipe for an eggy pasta dough is pretty simple.  For every egg, I use 100g of Tipo ’00′ pasta making flour and a pinch of salt.  Then depending on the dryness of the flour, the temperature on the day and whether the stars are in celestial alignment, you may need to add a wee bit of water before the kneading stage.  I don’t quite know how to explain this, but if the dough is not elasticising and sort of splits when you put pressure on it, you may need to add a tablespoon or so of water.

But to the directions.  Pile up your flour on the table/board, and make a well in the centre.  Break the eggs into the well, and then using a pinching motion, bring the edges of the flour into the egg and start mixing.  Start moving all the flour and egg together into a ball, and knead, knead, knead until smooth.   Wrap it in plastic and let rest for half an hour.

After the dough has rested, you can then use your pasta machine / rolling pin to make thin sheets of pasta.  If using a machine, take a fist sized ball of dough and put it through the pasta rollers on the biggest setting.  You may need to do this a number of times, folding after each pass, till you have a nice smooth pasta sheet.  Then you can start reducing the settings on your machine until you can roll it through on the finest setting.  Voila…a sheet of pasta!

I had whipped up a filling for the ravioli, in this instance veal/pork mince, parsley, parmesan, onion, egg, breadcrumbs and seasoning, all blitzed up to a paste.  We layed the pasta sheets over the ravioli mould, and then spooned little morsels of meat into each indentation.  Another pasta sheet was placed on top, and then we ran the rolling pin over the lot to ‘cut’ the individual ravioli.

We also made some tortellini, filled with ricotta cheese (my mix includes ricotta, parmesan, nutmeg, seasoning and egg to bind).  These are a little different in that you cut squares (or circles), place the filling in the centre, fold them in half, seal, then wrap them around your thumb while pinching the ends together. Yeah…I know….that sounded confusing.  Go watch Guy Grossi do it instead – it’s a visual thing.

Then comes the eating!  Yay!  Make sure you have plenty of boiling SALTED water.  I find that it is best if you bring the pot up to a rapid boil, then reduce the heat to a rolling boil.  Put your pasta in, give it a gentle stir to make sure it doesn’t stick, then stick on the lid to bring it back up to the boil again, stirring occassionally.  These babies will only need five or so minutes to cook, depending on their size.

Sauce them. Sprinkle with parmesan.  Eat.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed Ella’s pasta making book.  She got a gold star!  Well deserved if I do say so myself