Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [113]
2 cups all-purpose unbleached flour
½ teaspoon salt
Up to 1 cup lukewarm water
1. Combine the semolina, the all-purpose flour, and salt on your work counter, making a mound with a well in the center. Add a few tablespoons of water at a time, incorporating it with the flour until it has absorbed as much water as it can without becoming stiff and dry. The consistency must not be sticky, but it can be somewhat softer than egg pasta.
2. Scrape away any crumbs of flour from the work surface, wash and dry your hands, and knead the mass for about 8 minutes, until it is smooth and elastic. Refer to the description of hand kneading pasta dough.
3. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let it rest about 15 minutes.
4. Pull off a ball about the size of a lemon from the kneaded mass, rewrapping the rest of the dough. Roll the ball into a sausage-like roll about ½ inch thick. Slice it into very thin disks, about 1/16 inch, if you are able. Place a disk in the cupped palm of one hand, and with a rotary pressure of the thumb of the other hand, make a hollow in the center, broadening the disk to a width of about 1 inch. The shape should resemble a shallow mushroom cap, slightly thicker at its edges than at its center. Repeat the procedure until you have used up all the dough.
5. If you are not using the orecchiette immediately, spread them out to dry on clean, dry cloth towels, turning them over from time to time. When they are fully dry, after about 24 hours, you can store them in a box in a kitchen cupboard for a month or more. They are cooked like any other pasta but will take longer than conventional fresh egg pasta.
Recommended sauce The most suitable is the Broccoli and Anchovy Sauce. Other good choices are Tomato and Anchovy Sauce, and Cauliflower Sauce with Garlic, Oil, and Chili Pepper.
Matching Pasta to Sauce
THE SHAPES pasta takes are numbered in the hundreds, and the sauces that can be devised for them are beyond numbering, but the principles that bring pasta and sauce together in satisfying style are few and simple. They cannot be ignored by anyone who wants to achieve the full and harmonious expression of flavor of which Italian cooking is capable.
Even if you have done everything else right when producing a dish of pasta—you have carefully made fine fresh pasta at home or bought the choicest quality imported Italian boxed, dry pasta; you have cooked a ravishing sauce from the freshest ingredients; you have boiled the pasta in lots of hot water, drained it perfectly al dente, deftly tossed it with sauce—your dish might not be completely successful unless you have given thought to matching pasta type and shape to a congenial sauce.
The two basic pasta types you’ll be considering are the boxed, factory-made, eggless dry kind and homemade, fresh, egg pasta. When well made, one is quite as good as the other, but what you can do with the former you would not necessarily want to do with the latter.
The exceptional firmness, the compact body, the grainier texture of factory-made pasta makes it the first choice when a sauce is based on olive oil, such as most seafood sauces and the great variety of light, vegetable sauces. That is not to say, however, that you must pass up all butter-based sauces. Boxed, dry pasta can establish a most enjoyable liaison with some of them, but the result will be different, weightier, more substantial.
When you use factory-made pasta, your choice of sauce will be affected by the shape. Spaghettini, thin spaghetti, is usually the best vehicle for an olive oil-based seafood sauce. Many tomato sauces, particularly when made with butter, work better with thicker spaghetti, in some cases with the hollow strands known as bucatini or perciatelli. Meat sauces or other chunky sauces nest best in larger hollow tubes such as rigatoni and penne, or in the cupped shape of conchiglie. Fusilli are marvelous with a dense, creamy sauce, such as the Sausages and Cream Sauce, which clings to all its twists and curls.
Factory-made pasta carries sauce firmly and boldly;