Day 61 - Pasta

Today I made pasta, which is not as hard as people might think. Pasta is essentially dough which is rolled out thinly and then pressed, cut and manipulated into various shapes - some of these are simple and can be done at home with no experience at all, some are not. Happily, I ended up making some of the former - cannelloni, which are essentially rolls of pasta with a filling which are baked in the oven.

Making the basic dough is not at all difficult - it is just flour and egg yolks, with a little salt as an optional extra. The dough has to be very dry, though because it needs to be able to stand up to being rolled out very thinly: according to Rachel, when Marcella Hazan visited the school many years ago, she was not impressed with Rachel's dough because her finger did not come out clean when she touched it. This dryness does cause some difficulty - the dough must be kneaded, which is not easy when it has about as much suppleness as plasticine and it needs to be kneaded for a long time. You come out of it wanting to sit down for a minute.

After kneading, you leave it to sit for about an hour and then roll it out. This is a job made infinitely easier by the use of a pasta rolling machine which does the whole thing in a matter of minutes. You could in theory roll it out by hand, but you wouldn't get the same result and it would be more effort. Eventually you end up with a few strips of pasta which you can do what you like with. I cut them into squares and put a chicken and pork stuffing on top of them before rolling them up, covering them with a cheese sauce and baking them in the oven for about half an hour. Cannelloni: what could be easier.

Pasta takes quite a while to make so I kept the rest of the morning light. I made a soda bread that unfortunately turned out to be a bit of a disaster and cooked some french beans. Cooking the beans was fun because I had about five minutes only right at the end of the morning to do them in: I prepared about 1.5lbs of beans by cutting them into three one at a time in less than the time it took for the water to boil which was an achievement that I was quite proud of.

The demonstration this afternoon was quite Indian - we did a few curries and I helped to make chapatis which are not as easy as they look. I'm looking forward to trying them out again on Monday.