Past-a perfect

Can anyone have pasta five days a week, three times a day? Yes. I can. I have no qualms in also admitting that I don't possess a single taste bud that can claim to be of a connoisseur's palate. My pasta-loyalist taste buds are absolutely blind in their reverence for this Italian staple and show no special preference for penne, angel hair or bow; nor do they thrill at any special pasta sauce. A Marinara is just as good as an Alfredo.

With no offence to a chef's creativity and credentials, my mind approaches pasta preparations with the same unbridled enthusiasm at the local bistro as it does at a fine dining Italian restaurant.

Having said that, however, I do follow a pecking order. For example, noodle pastas of all kinds are my second absolute favourites. I spend a considerable amount of time simply watching the sauces and their rather artless artistry clinging to the pasta.

Stuffed pastas, on the other hand, are a no-go area because first they confuse me; second I can't get myself to think of them as pastas and third, I don't know what to expect when I bite into them.

You see, I want to see what I eat.

With all this love for pasta you wouldn't be blamed for thinking I'd be a dab hand at making it. Well, my confessions regarding pasta are only about eating it.

And having bored my colleagues to tears with my daily litany of what I had eaten the previous day, what I was planning to eat for lunch and for dinner, and my dreams of the next day's lunch and dinner being planned in thinking-out-loud bouts through the day I ended up in a predicament of my own making. The edict from my team was clear: either I stop this unbearable pasta prattle or go learn to make it and bring to work a dish that would let me off the hook forever.

But how can one make pasta at home, I cried? The Italians have been doing just that for centuries, they glared back at me.

What did not make my case easy was my initial chat with Corrado Pani, Chef de Cuisine at the Mediterranean restaurant Splendido at The Ritz Carlton. "I managed to find pasta even in Alaska," he tells me as we talk of my apprenticeship with him for an afternoon and others things pasta. "It was very easy for the Italians to introduce pasta to the world because with it you do not need to bring anything. You just find flour and water everywhere." In other words, I need to take along my love for pasta and my absolute ineptitude at making it.

One heartbeat of standing around in the kitchens of Splendido and I knew chefs didn't pick ready made pasta packets off supermarket shelves, bring back to the hotel and dunk them in boiling water till al dente. They truthfully, patiently, lovingly make pasta from scratch. Fresh pasta. Every day. Every meal. That was enough to make me want to run away right then and there. It's a bit like building a boat in order to go sailing. Or at least that's how I felt at that moment.

To backtrack a bit, before I met the chef I'd given home pasta-making a shot the previous weekend. It was better to mess up my kitchen, make a fool of myself and learn a little in the process rather than do all of this under the keen eye of a professional.

I borrowed a pasta-making machine from Jashanmal Stores - the Kenwood Chef Kitchen Machine with three pasta attachments, namely a Tagliatelle cutter, a Taglioni cutter and a Trenette cutter. The store also stocks round pasta attachments, but I figured I only wanted to try my hand at making the most basic ribbon pastas rather than anything complicated. My husband laughed about me abandoning my first love (penne pasta) but I let him have his moment of fun.

In a bout of complete insanity, I decided to allow my husband to bring a colleague home to sample my first-ever attempt at home-made pasta. I decided to serve a tomato pasta dish as an appetiser before dinner. I set up the Kenwood machine in the kitchen and declared the cooking zone out of bounds for everyone in the house. Recollecting bits of advice from friends and family, I poured water, two cups of white flour, half a cup of semolina and olive oil in the mixing bowl and begun to read the manual (an exercise I absolutely detest). Soon, my brain told me it was either the manual or my common sense.

So I threw the manual aside, placed the ingredients in the machine and let it knead. To my surprise the machine seemed friendly and I managed to get the dough's consistency right after adding a generous amount of olive oil for elasticity. I was absolutely thrilled with my efforts and picked a pasta attachment (a Tagliatelle cutter) to continue in my enterprise. After umpteen attempts at reading and re-reading the manual, I was still nowhere with the attachment in the right place.

I panicked and summoned my husband who discovered that I was missing a connecter attachment between the two gadgets. By then the guest had arrived. Leaving it to its trauma and having no time to have a heart-to-heart with it, I opened a bag of tortilla chips and served them with a few bowls of dips from jars.

Dinner was uneventful. But the night was young and I was determined to get back to the pasta and make good. It was 11:30pm and after a fair amount of poking around in the carton the machine came in, I found the culprit - the connector attachment under a mound of bubble wrap. It was time to connect the dots. I did.

The attachment went into the grooves and the cutter smoothly fitted into the main machine. I took a bit of dough and with a rolling pin flattened it and fitted it on the cutter. As soon as the machine whirred to action, the dough begun taking the shape of ribbon noodle strands. I managed to get about 20 to 25 perfect strands. Satisfied, I left the noodles be.

In a large pan, I brought plenty of fresh water to a rolling boil, swirled a bit of olive oil into it and gently slid the ribbon pasta in. Now it was all about how good I was to sneak up on the al dente moment which can be notoriously footloose.

The only thing that worried me was that the strands were stating to gain in girth. (I learnt later from Chef Corrado that the thickness of the dough is supposed to be not more than 1mm or the pasta ends up as a rather rustic-version of itself). Urban pasta has to look a bit sleek, if you know what I mean.

The midnight hour having long left my kitchen I was in no mood to embark on a sauce-making journey. I opted for the tried-and-tested tomato, garlic, oregano and shavings of Mozzarella beauty that never fails to please. As I picked the pan off the gas, the aroma was decidedly lifting my spirits.

Sure the pasta looked a bit thick and lumpy but the sauce was fine. Plus there's always a next time, I told myself. It was time to eat my dinner. All by myself. I wasn't complaining.

Kinds of pastas:

Pasta comes in innumerable variants -- there are over a hundred different varieties known. And 30-40 of them are extremely popular variants both dry as well as fresh. These again differ in terms of traditions and sauces. As Chef Corrado says, "Different sauces go with different cuts of pastas. You just can't do a spaghetti with arabiata sauce. The ‘penne arabiata' dish has to be made using penne pasta only."

Contrary to what most believe, when pastas look different, they don't just go by the differing face value (in shape), the different shapes actually lend themselves to differing levels of sauce holding, consistency of the dish, and ease of eating - things chefs insist are really important.

Shapes and cuts create genres such as:

Round Pasta shapes: Such as Fusilli

Strand noodle pastas: Such as Spaghetti

Ribbon pastas: Such as Fettucine and Tagliatelle

Tubular pastas: Such as Penne Pasta

Stuffed pastas: Such as Ravioli and Cannelloni

Irregular shapes: Such as Gnocchi

Micro pastas: Such as Fregula and rice-grains shaped Orzo

All the above fall into either dry pastas or fresh pastas categories. Dry pastas are the ones we can find in dried versions in supermarkets.

Making it from scratch

Doing the dough

When making pasta at home, getting the right consistency for the dough is of prime importance. The consistency is right when the dough leaves the surface of the mixing bowl and is no longer sticky. Remember to mix a fair amount of olive oil into the dough if it doesn't seem elastic enough.

Flavourings

Chef Corrado recommends one to be creative with the flavourings. You can create a garlic dough using garlic-infused olive oil or a tomato/spinach pasta dough by mixing fresh tomato/spinach purée with the dough.

Add saffron water and you get a nice yellow colour and flavour to your dough.

To add a special flavour, you can infuse the olive oil with garlic. Put garlic in the oil, heat the oil up to 60-70 degrees for one hour and then use the oil to add a subtle flavour to the dough.

Chefs come up with creative recipes of pasta dough using eggs and while the volume of the egg stays the same, they create variations by using the yolks, whole eggs or a mixture of both.

More nutritious pastas

Make buckwheat pasta as it has a high fibre content compared to refined white flour. Buckwheat flour is available in speciality food stores. In such a dough, one needs to mix buckwheat flour with white flour to achieve the right elasticity. But it has a rusty taste so it needs some strong flavouring such as rosemary with it.

Another way to create healthier pastas is to tweak the sauces. "Go for organic tomatoes, spinach and cut down on rich ingredients such as eggs, Parmesan cheese, condiments and so on.

When making the dough add a spoon of the best quality virgin olive oil you can find. It's good for your body and skin.

Preserving fresh pasta

According to Chef Corrado, you can easily use the pasta made the day before, or in the evening. But low quality semolina can cause some pasta to turn black so use good quality ingredients only. You can store ravioli in the freezer for a week. When ready to use, steam it for three minutes at 70°C.

Chef Corrado shares a basic eggless pasta recipe:

Knead together 500g of white flour or durum semolina (you'll find it at well-known supermarkets), 250g water, 3g salt and 30ml olive oil. As a variation, you can also mix 2 portions or flour and one portion of semolina to make the dough.

For those who don't wish to use a kneading machine, kneading the dough with hand is also an option. Just mix the white flour and salt then place it in a mixing bowl/tray. Create a well in the centre and add the liquid ingredients, mix the dough with your hand. Now knead it for a good 10-15 minutes. Add a bit of good-quality olive oil for elasticity.

Once done, cover the dough with a plate. If you have a roller machine you don't need to flatten it with a rolling pin. After that all you need is the right cutter attachments.

Round pastas such as fusilli, require pasta die attachments, ribbon pastas such as tagliatelle and fetuccine need cutters while flat stuffed ones like lasagna can be rolled by rollers/rolling pin and then cut into shape by hand.

All these are quite easy to attempt at home.

As far as thickness is concerned, a 1mm sheet is desired for achieving a good-looking dish.