Miriel

Making fresh pasta is just about the stupidest thing you can do. It takes forever and really, you can just go down to your local Italian restaurant and pick up a plate of fresh pasta that you didn't have to slave over for hours and hours and that'll only cost you $15 and 15 minutes.

But, people do stupid things all the time, so here we go. My guide to making fresh pasta. Recipe is from Sophisticated Gourmet which adapted its recipe from Thomas Keller's famous 7 egg yolk pasta.

Ingredients:
⅔ Cups + 1 tblspn All-Purpose Flour (4oz)
½ Cups + 2 tblspns Semolina Flour (4oz)
6 large egg yolks
1 large egg
1 ½ teaspoons olive oil
1 tablespoon milk or dry white wine (i.e. Pinot Grigio)
Extra All-Purpose Flour for kneading

You start off by mixing together the all purpose flour with the semolina and creating a crater in the flour for your eggs to go. You want to make sure the crater is big enough to hold all the eggs, olive oil, and milk without spilling over. Because if it spills out, it's game over.



Once you have your crater and your wet mixture set up, slowly, so freakin' slowly, you're gonna whisk in bits of flour into the center. You have to do this with a tiny bit of flour at a time. Mix in the flour too fast and you'll get a hard as rock lump and look at that you asshole, you've just wasted 7 egg yolks.



It'll get thicker and thicker until it gets to be the consistency of cookie dough, and eventually when you have all the flour mixed in, you'll be able to form a flaky little ball.



Now comes the armwork, you're going to knead this mothersmurfer for 15 minutes. In a forward motion with the heel of your palms, you're gonna push and knead at the dough, re-form into a ball, push and knead, re-form, and on and on. After 15 minutes when your arm feels like it's going to fall off, knead for another minute. Why do you have to knead it for so long to the point where you're cursing and wishing you'd never started this stupid project? I dunno, Thomas Keller says you have to or you'll die or something.



Cut the dough into manageable chunks and flatten to start rolling out the dough through your fancy pants pasta maker that was totally expensive and you hardly ever use.



You're gonna run it through the machine a bunch of times until you work your way to the thinnest setting.



Now you've got fresh pasta! You can make any sort of pasta at this point, spaghetti, fettuccine, as long as you have the tools for it. I chose to be extra masochistic and do raviolis. Which is a whole new set of issues.

In honor of fall, the filling I chose for the ravioli here is butternut squash. Really easy to do. Cut a butternut squash in half and just roast and caramlize the squash for 1 hour in the oven at 375. Scrape out the sweet creamy insides and mix it with some ricotta cheese, Parmesan cheese, sauteed shallots, and some chopped sage. Use a spoon or a pastry bag to pipe a little filling onto the pasta sheets.



Make sure to leave enough space between each ravioli to be able to create a seal.



Then use your cute little ravioli cutters ($5 at William Sonoma!) to cut the individual ravioli.



Top with a quick brown butter and sage sauce, some fresh parmesan cheese and you're good to go!



It also really helps to have an adorable cuddly companion cheer you on during this arduous process.