Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [74]
Cutting handmade pasta When the dough has reached a desirable stage of dryness, roll up the sheet on the pasta pin, remove the towel from the counter, and unroll the pasta from the pin, laying it flat on the work surface. Pick up the edge of the sheet farthest from you, and fold the sheet loosely about 3 inches in from the edge. Fold it again, and again, until the whole sheet has been folded into a long, flat, rectangular roll about 3 inches wide.
With a cleaver or other suitable knife, cut the roll across into ribbons, ¼ inch wide for tagliatelle, a little narrower for fettuccine. Unfold the ribbons and spread out on a dry, clean, cloth towel. See instructions on drying pasta for long-term storage, and for other cuts.
Using handmade pasta for tortellini and other shapes If you are going to make stuffed pasta and other shapes that require soft dough, do not let the pasta sheet dry. Refer to remarks on dough for stuffed pasta.
Trim one end of the pasta sheet to give it a straight edge. (Save the trimmings to cut into soup squares.) Cut off a rectangular strip from the sheet; if you are making tortellini, the strip should be 1½ inches wide; if you are making tortelloni or other square shapes, the strip should be twice the width of the shape required by the recipe.
Move the remaining sheet of dough to one side, and cover it with plastic wrap to keep it from drying. Use the strip to make tortellini, or any other shape. When the one strip has been turned into the desired shape, cut off another identical strip from the main sheet, remembering afterward to keep the main sheet covered in plastic wrap.
Pasta Sauces
TOMATO SAUCES
For a long time, Italian dishes abroad had been characterized by such a heavy-handed use of tomato that, for the many who had begun to discover refinement and infinite variety in the regional cuisines of Italy, the color red and any taste of tomato in a sauce came to represent a coarse and discredited style of cooking. The moment for a major reassessment may be at hand.
There is nothing inherently crude about tomato sauce. Quite the contrary: No other preparation is more successful in delivering the prodigious satisfactions of Italian cooking than a competently executed sauce with tomatoes; no flavor expresses more clearly the genius of Italian cooks than the freshness, the immediacy, the richness of good tomatoes adroitly matched to the most suitable choice of pasta.
The sauces that are grouped immediately below are those in which tomatoes have a dominant role. They are followed by a broad selection of recipes that shift their focus from tomatoes to other vegetables, to cheese, to fish, to meat, illustrating the unrestricted choice of ingredients on which a pasta sauce can be based.
The basic cooking method Pasta sauces may cook slowly or rapidly, they may take 4 minutes or 4 hours, but they always cook by evaporation, which concentrates and clearly defines their flavor. Never cook a sauce in a covered pan, or it will emerge with a bland, steamed, weakly formulated taste.
Tasting a sauce and correcting for salt A sauce must be sufficiently savory to season pasta adequately. Blandness is not a virtue, tastelessness is not a joy. Always taste a sauce before tossing the pasta with it. If it seems barely salty enough on its own, it’s not salty enough for the pasta. Remember it must have flavor enough to cover a pound or more of cooked, virtually unsalted pasta.
When tomato is the main ingredient: If they are available, use fresh, naturally and fully ripened, plum tomatoes. Varieties other than the plum may be used, if they are equally ripe and truly fruity, not watery. If completely satisfactory fresh tomatoes are not available, it is better to use canned imported Italian plum tomatoes. If your local grocers do not carry these, experiment with other canned varieties until you can determine which has the best flavor and consistency. See a brief discussion of fresh