Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [68]
• Tagliatelle When you use the broader cutters of the pasta machine, what you get is fettuccine. Tagliatelle, the classic Bolognese noodle and the best suited to Bolognese meat sauce, is a little broader and must be cut by hand. When the thinned strips of pasta are dry enough to cut, but still soft enough to bend without cracking, fold them up loosely along their length, making a flat roll about 3 inches wide at its sides. With a cleaver or similar knife, cut the roll into ribbons about ¼ inch wide. Cut parallel to the original length of the pasta strip so that when you unroll the tagliatelle the noodle will be the full length of the strip.
Drying noodles for long storage It is often assumed that fresh pasta must be soft. Nothing could be more misleading. It is indeed soft the moment it’s made, and it is perfectly all right to cook it while it is still in that state. But if one waits it will dry; it is a natural process and there is no reason to interfere with it. On the contrary, all the artificial methods by which fresh pasta is kept soft—sprinkling it with cornmeal, wrapping in plastic, refrigerating it—are not merely unnecessary, they actually undermine the quality of the pasta and ought to be shunned. When cooked, properly dried fresh pasta delivers all the texture and flavor it had originally. The limp product marketed as “fresh” pasta does not.
Once dried, fresh homemade noodles can be stored for weeks in a cupboard, just like a box of spaghetti. As the noodles are cut, gather several strands at a time and curl them into circular nest shapes. Allow them to dry totally before storing them because, if any moisture remains when they are put away, mold will develop. To be safe, let the nests dry on towels for 24 hours. When dry, place them in a large box or tin, interleaving each layer of nests with paper towels. Handle carefully because they are brittle. Store in a dry cupboard, not in the refrigerator.
Note Allow slightly more cooking time for dried fresh pasta.
SOUP PASTA
It is in its cuts for soup that homemade pasta, with its light egg flavor and gentler consistency, clearly emerges as more desirable than the boxed factory-made kind.
• Maltagliati It is the best pasta you can use for thick soups, especially bean soups. Its name means “badly cut,” because its irregular lozenge shape is not that of a long, even-sided ribbon. Fold the pasta strips into flat rolls, as described above for tagliatelle. Instead of cutting the roll straight as you would for regular noodles, cut it on the bias, cutting off first one corner, then the other. This leaves the pasta roll coming to a sharp point in the center of its cut end. Even off that end with a straight cut across, then cut off the corners once more as before. When you have finished cutting one roll, unfold and loosen the maltagliati immediately so they don’t stick to each other.
Every time you make pasta, it is a good idea to use some of the dough for maltagliati. It can be dried for long storage, as described above, and you will have it available any time you want to add it to a soup.
• Quadrucci They are little squares, as their Italian name tells us, and they are made by first cutting the pasta into tagliatelle widths then, instead of unfolding the noodles, cutting them crosswise into squares. Quadrucci are particularly lovely in a fine homemade meat broth with peas and sautéed chicken livers.
• Manfrigul It is pasta chopped into small, barley-like nuggets, a specialty of Romagna, the northeastern coastal area on the Adriatic. Its robust, inimitable chewiness contributes enjoyable textural contrast to soup.
Prepare kneaded dough. Flatten the dough with the palm of your hand to a thickness of about 2 inches. Cut it into the thinnest possible slices and spread these on a clean, dry, cloth towel. Turn them once or twice and allow them to dry until they lose