spaghetti and lasagna

I think I mentioned it before, but making pasta is fun. It's a very tactile experience, and then there's the smell of fresh pasta. This weekend, I used a stand mixer for the kneading (because I'm old and lazy, and I no longer want to be that tactile), and a crank-roller* to make sheets of lasagna as well as noodles in two sizes (fettuccine and spaghetti). After making enough lasagna noodles, I had extra pasta that I turned into spaghetti, and the leftover red sauce that went into the lasagna became my quasi-bolognese (normally, a bolognese is made with ground beef, but I had wanted my lasagna to be made with pork sausage, so that's the meat I was stuck with). After cooking the noods and microwaving the sauce, I added some of the rest of my lasagna-topping cheese—a mix of mozzarella, Parmigiano, garlic powder, black pepper, and a bit of milk (because I blitzed everything in a food processor). I piled the cheese on top, nuked everything in the microwave to get a good melt, and the results are below. I also have a pic of one of the two lasagnas I made; the second lasagna came out more suntanned, and while I like that sort of thing, I don't think you readers like it as much, so I'm only showing you the bigger, better-looking lasagna.

fresh, homemade pasta—spaghetti

'waved meat sauce placed on top

cheese mix on top of that

a minute in the microwave

the bigger of the two lasagnas

I played with the color settings on my phone to make things less pale.
This color is also a bit more realistic: the phone's normal setting makes everything pale.

The spaghetti was really, really good. The sausage I'd made was a combination of ground pork and super-fatty pancetta. It was also a pretty small portion, but I enjoyed it. 

One lesson that was brought home to me about lasagna was that the container matters. I think metal baking dishes/pans are okay, but glass is probably better for a slower, more evenly distributed heating. Also: I really need to get deeper baking dishes for lasagna. Both of my lasagnas boiled over slightly, and I hadn't even stacked them very tall. I'm going to cool them down in the freezer—not to the point where they're frozen solid—then cut them into portions and containerize them individually to take to work.

Here's a philosophical question: how do you count the layers in a lasagna? Do you count only the cheese/Béchamel and meat sauce, or do you count each covering of pasta as its own layer? Assuming the pasta counts as its own layer, my lasagnas were like this, from the bottom up:

1. meat layer (bottom)
2. pasta (next layer up—pasta layer 1)
3. cheese/mushroom/spinach-mix layer
4. pasta (layer 2)
5. meat layer (near the top)
6. pasta (highest pasta layer—layer 3)
7. mozz/Parm/garlic mix (top layer)

So that's a seven-layer lasagna by that reckoning, but if you count only the cheese and meat sauce (I'm not a Béchamel guy when I make lasagna), then it's just four layers: two meat sauce, two cheese mix.

I've got extra cheese left, so I might make my smaller lasagna look less suntanned by melting some extra cheese over the top layer.

My boss and I will eat well tomorrow, at least, whatever the CEO might throw at us.

__________

*You don't need fancy equipment to make pasta. A rolling pin and a knife will do. Instead of using a stand mixer, you can dump your flour onto your clean, hair-free work surface. Make a crater in the middle of your flour mountain; dump in your eggs, salt, and oil. Recipes vary, but my rule of thumb is one egg per 100 g of flour, and about 1 tbsp of olive oil for the same. Salt (I use kosher) is eyeballed; I go with a bit more than a pinch. With the eggs, salt, and oil dumped into the crater of your flour mountain, use a fork to beat the eggs and mix them with the oil and salt. If you beat in a circular motion, start widening your circles to include more and more flour until all the flour has been included into the mix. 

Eventually, you'll reach a point where the fork is no longer needed, and you'll have your pasta dough. It'll be rough, wet, and sticky at this point, so feel free to dust the dough with a little flour so it's not constantly clumping around your fingers. Knead for at least five minutes, but closer to ten minutes might be better since you're doing this manually. (With a stand mixer and a dough hook, five minutes will do.) 

With the dough now more coherent-looking (ball-like) and less sticky, stick it in a bowl, cover it, and let the dough rest for thirty minutes to allow the flour to keep hydrating (and for the gluten in the flour to relax). 

After it's done resting, cut it into pieces, dust it with more flour, and use a rolling pin to roll the dough into a tortilla that's somewhere between an eighth to a fourth of an inch thick (about 0.3 to 0.6 cm). Closer to an eighth of an inch is better. Dust the tortilla with a bit more flour so it doesn't stick to itself, then roll it up into a cigar shape. 

Take a knife and cut the dough into thin or thick strips—whatever you prefer. Unroll, and voilà: you've got noodles! The smell, during these latter stages, ought to be awesome because you're dealing with fresh pasta. Dust your noodles with more flour, plump/fluff them with your fingers to cover everything with the flour, then prep them for storage or for immediate use. (Storage can be done several ways. Some people put their pasta in little bird's-nest-shaped piles on a large tray, then cover and freeze the pasta. Others use mini-Ziploc bags to store each individual bird's nest. What you do is up to you.)

That's how you make pasta with no stand mixer or pasta roller. Old school.

A final note about al dente noodles (al dente = "to the tooth," i.e., the pasta is a bit firm and slightly resists your bite, with some of the pasta literally sticking to the hollows of your molars when you chew; in Asia, this just means your pasta is undercooked; in Italy, though, this is perfection): if you're planning to dump your freshly made pasta right into some boiling water, you're not going to get al dente results. But leave your pasta out to dry for a day (after you get to the bird's-nest stage); when you boil it, you can control the length of time the pasta is in the water and arrive at al dente naturally. I've actually never done this: every time I've made fresh pasta, I've either used it right away or used it after freezing it. When you freeze the pasta, the moisture inside the noodles stays with the noodles and doesn't evaporate out, so frozen noodles won't give you an al dente result. I love al dente when I use store-bought pasta; when I make my own pasta, I don't really miss it.