Week 21 - learning how to make pasta

I am quite literally stumped.  Frankly, what is there to say?  How on earth have I never made pasta?  I just don't understand.  Me? Lover of food, cooking and dining.  I just think I'm a bit weird to have never learnt or tried or really thought about it until now.  Maybe recently I could say it that it is because I don't eat pasta (I tend to stay off the carbs and gluten) but why didn't I learn in my twenties?

Anyway, its these few and far between moments that make me thankful I'm doing this ridiculous blog.  I'm actively searching for things that I genuinely want to do and so I'm ticking things off a list that I didn't quite know existed.  Turns out, I was desperate to learn how to make pasta.  Oh the absolute joy of it.  I loved it.  Brothers Sharff, here lies a little hint of what might make a good birthday present this year!!

So there are plenty of places where you can learn how to make pasta, but The House of Peroni is on for a six-week residency at the moment in Haggerston and one of the things they are offering amongst their many experiences, are weekly pasta making classes with artisan pasta specialists Burro e Salvia.  

I went with my friend Rachel and when we arrived we met with the owner of Burro e Salvia, Gaia and one of her assistants, Livia.  Both were wonderfully passionate and charismatic Italian women and I felt very at ease with them from the start.  Once we had washed our hands, put on our aprons and grabbed ourselves a cold bottle of Peroni, we dove straight in.

In front of us was nothing more than a wooden board, some flour, an egg and a couple of tools.  Honestly, hand on heart, I'm not sure that if someone had asked me what ingredients go into pasta, what I would have said. Did I think it was just egg and flour?  I'm a bit baffled by this but then again, what might I have said as well as egg and flour? Water? salt? oil? milk?! Hmmm.  Anyway, regardless, I'm certainly sure now.

Saying all of that, Gaia did then mention that of course, some people do make pasta with water but no egg i.e. the durum wheat pasta that is often made in the south of Italy, traditionally because people who lived in the South years ago were poorer and couldn't afford eggs.  She talked about how at Burro e Salvia they like to cook their pasta in an artisan way, so with no added water, salt or anything else.  Just 00 flour (strong and white) and an egg, preferably with a very orange, healthy-looking yolk.  The orange is apparently from carotene and is always dependent on what is fed to the hens.

We started off by putting the flour into a circular mound on our boards and then creating a well in the middle, which we then cracked our egg into.  As you can see, these were eggs with lovely, rich, orange yolks (which then go on to make pasta with a very good, yellow colour).

Once the egg is safely in the well, you start mixing it into the flour with a fork.  It takes a little bit of time and effort not to spill the egg over the mound and get it all whisked in.  Once all the liquid has gone it turns into more of a workable dough that you then start working with the palms of your hands.

You have to do this for a while so the dough is nice and smooth; you can finish it off with a rolling pin.  Then comes the really fun part that actually just made me giggle and laugh like a lunatic child.  There is something so unbelievably satisfying about rolling the dough through the pasta machine and seeing it stretch and get thinner and thinner.  We had to do this about three, if not four times to get a really long, workable piece of dough.  As you can see, Rachel and I got stuck in whole-heartedly.

After the endless fun with the pasta machines we then had to split our dough up into two large pieces and use the cutters and equipment to form the shapes we wanted.  We started off by making Farfalle and Garganelli.  Farfalle is the one, Gaia told us, that looks like a bow-tie even though the word farfalle actually means butterfly.  We used a ravioli cutter to make these, simply by cutting out a square and then pinching the middle to form the bow-tie or wings!
Garganelli is sort of similar to Penne in shape, but its made using a gnocchi ridger and paddle to create a rolled up tube.

Now normally, I like to look around a room and see what other people are doing, you know, spy on them a little bit and check to see if what they're doing is better than me or worse or if I'm being too slow or to get some ideas, whatever.  But with this class I had no idea what anyone else was doing and frankly couldn't have cared less.  I found it so relaxing and enjoyable that I was only focused on me and was oblivious to what and how others were doing.

Finally, with our other large piece of the dough, we all made tagliatelle.  Yes!  Another chance to use the pasta machine and this time, the cutter.  Look!  It makes ribbons!  

I attempted to make a nest by flailing my hands around and then put all my delectable creations in a cute little Burro e Salvia box. How could I not want to eat all of these creations that brought me such joy?

I loved the class so much and it was done so well.  If you have the chance, do make sure you go to The House of Peroni, its on for the whole of June.  If not, Burro e Salvia run regular classes at both, their Shoreditch and East Dulwich shops.

I took myself straight home for an Italian dinner.  There was no question what I was going to have with my pasta since I already had all of the ingredients in the house.  Home-made pasta with home-made pesto.  Yum.