A World of Noodles

Some of the recipes will ask you to make your own pasta dough. For this, you’ll need a flat surface, a rolling pin, and perhaps a wooden rack for drying the noodles after they’re formed. A hand-cranked pasta machine will make this task much easier, and some of the recipes in this book call for one. Please promise me, though, that you’ll only buy a pasta machine if you intend to use it fairly often. Of course, if you’re a noodle fan, you should both own one and use it. Remember that the expense of buying the machine will be offset by the low cost of homemade noodles; a couple of batches a month would easily make up for the initial outlay.

Anything else? A baking dish for things like ziti (page 52) and kugel (page 239), a stock pot or Dutch oven for dishes like chicken noodle soup, a cutting board to work on, some kitchen tongs to grasp hot items in the pot, and some pot holders to grab the pots themselves. Don’t overdo it! The more stuff you use, the more stuff you have to clean afterward. Instead, use the money you save to buy something delicious—you have my permission.

People have been making noodles for thousands of years; they’ve even been found in ancient Chinese tombs. I’m not surprised by this at all; once they’re dry, noodles can last almost forever, waiting patiently until you bring them to life in a pot of boiling water and define yourself culturally by choosing a sauce.

While almost everything has been added to the mix at one time or another, there are three basic ingredients: flour, water, and salt. That’s it. Except that it isn’t. The flour you choose is important. Most of us think of flour as the bag of white stuff that starts leaking even before you get it home from the supermarket. There’s more, though—it comes in thousands of varieties: on store shelves, you’ll see all-purpose, bread, cake, and others too. When it comes to noodle making, you can safely ignore bleached white flour and cake flour. Both are important in baking, but make a dough that’s too mushy for noodles, something you almost certainly wind up eating with a fork or chopsticks. The ideal flour is durum semolina.

Durum semolina sounds like it should be rare and difficult to find. Yet, because it’s the basic building block of dried pasta, it’s grown all over the place and sold in markets that cater to serious cooks. What is it? Durum wheat is a variety that’s very high in protein and low in gluten. This means it’s easier to roll into the right shapes. It also gives that famous al dente texture that people talk about (al dente is Italian for “at teeth”; that is, you can feel the firmness of the cooked noodles at your teeth when you chew them). Semolina is the way the flour is ground. Indeed, a handful of semolina is coarser and yellower than an equal amount of all-purpose. So flour can be semolina but not durum and durum but not semolina. Your ideal noodle flour is both.

Basic Noodles

The basic formula for fresh noodles is easy: for every cup of flour add half a cup of water, and then follow the instructions for mixing and kneading.

1. Combine the water and flour in a large bowl. Mix until a dough forms, first with a wooden spoon, and then with your hands. If the mixture is too liquid, add flour, 1 tablespoon at a time, until it can be formed into a kneadable ball. If the mixture is too dry, add water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the dough is soft enough to knead.

2. Sprinkle some flour on a flat surface and knead the dough. After about 5 minutes, it will be springy and elastic with gluten; this is the bread stage. For great noodles, you need to go beyond the bread stage and knead until the dough holds the shape you form it into without springing back, about 10 minutes.

3. Wrap the dough in a kitchen towel or plastic wrap and let it rest for at least 30 minutes before rolling it out. This gives the flour grains a chance to fully absorb the water. If you’re making the dough ahead of time, refrigerate or freeze it after you knead it and before you roll it out.

ROLLING THE DOUGH While the dough can be flattened and shaped with a rolling pin—or even pounded with a flat stone—nothing is better suited to the task than a pasta machine (see “Tools of the Trade,” page 19). Once you have your machine firmly attached to your table (it comes with a clamp for this purpose), start by pressing a small amount of dough into a pancake between your palms. Then on the machine’s thickest setting—almost always marked “1”— start cranking the dough through. After four or five trips through the pasta machine, the dough should stay flat and smooth and hold its shape. Then change the thickness to setting 2 and repeat. Keep rolling it through thinner and thinner settings until you have what you need—4 will suffice for a simple linguine or tagliatelle; 5 or 6 for angel hair or other fine shapes.

CUTTING AND DRYING THE NOODLES Your pasta machine will also have a setting for cutting the pasta sheets into strands. Once your strands are cut, lay them out on a drying rack or sheet of floured parchment paper to dry. If you’re planning to cook the pasta immediately, 30 minutes of drying will allow the dough to set up correctly. To store them, dry them until they are stiff—about 8 hours—then put them in a plastic container until you’re ready to cook them.

When you first see your own homemade pasta, you may be a bit put off by how rough it looks, but after a few batches of fresh, noodles from a box will start to look like mass-produced plastic cutouts. That’s the moment you can call yourself a real artisan.

Basic Egg Noodles

If a boiled and shaped piece of dough made from flour and water is where noodle cuisine starts, then a boiled and shaped dough of flour, eggs, and water is a natural second step. The person who first added an egg to noodle dough and their logic for doing so is lost to history. Perhaps they wanted to share a hard-to-find protein source among a large group of dough eaters, or maybe it was some sort of happy accident. However it happened, it was obvious that this added ingredient made noodles with a more tender texture, a beautiful golden color, and more nutrition.

Egg noodle recipes are found all over the world, and they generally follow this basic formula.

1. Combine the flour and eggs in a large bowl. Mix until a dough forms, first with a wooden spoon, and then with your hands. If the mixture is too liquid, add flour, 1 tablespoon at a time, until it can be formed into a kneadable ball. If the mixture is too dry, add water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the dough is soft enough to knead.

Variation: In northern Italy, chefs make an even richer version of egg noodles by using only yolks. To do this, substitute 2 yolks for each egg. This dish, known as tajarin, is served with butter, grated Parmesan, and (when possible) fresh truffle shavings.

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ADAPTED FROM A WORLD OF DUMPLINGS

In adding color to your noodles, the basic ingredients are spinach leaves for green and carrot for orange. Here are the recipes:

FOR GREEN:

1 cup wilted or thawed frozen chopped spinach leaves

FOR ORANGE:

1 cup carrot pieces, boiled until fork-tender

Combine either ingredient (but not both together!) in a blender with 1 cup of water. Purée until you have a smooth liquid. Substitute this for water in any wheat dough recipe.

You can make yellow pasta doughs too: add one teaspoon of ground turmeric for each cup of flour before adding any liquids and then proceed as usual.

Pasta is easy enough to cook, and yet we cooks ruin it so often. What’s going on here? The principle is simple enough: you put it in boiling water and cook until it becomes tender enough to eat. You then drain it and either eat it right away or incorporate it into your dish.

MY FAVORITE 16TH-CENTURY ITALIAN FOOD WRITER, Cristoforo da Messisbugo, wrote that pasta “should be cooked long enough to say a short prayer.” Good advice for those who pray while cooking. Today, though, we all say al dente, which means “at teeth” in Italian and is somehow mistakenly understood as “undercooked.” There’s some sense to this. If pasta is so flabby that it doesn’t offer any resistance when you bite into it, it won’t have any taste, either. The problem is testing it properly.

I’ve watched all kinds of people, from elderly Italian ladies to Japanese teenagers, cook spaghetti, and everybody seems to use the same method to test for doneness—they taste it. The method seems reliable enough; the only problem might come from being indecisive or having a huge appetite and eating too much of it during testing.

Is there any other way? What about the method of grabbing a strand and throwing it at the wall? If it sticks, it’s ready, if it doesn’t, it needs more cooking. Presumably, if it’s overcooked it will fall apart in your hand before you can give it a proper hurl.

I thought that the practice of spaghetti throwing began with a 1970s TV cooking show called The Romagnolis’ Table. I clearly remember a scene that began with throwing pasta at the ceiling and devolved into the Romagnolis throwing pasta at each other. I found an earlier reference, a book called You Can Cook If You Can Read (Viking Press, 1946; no relation to today’s website of the same name) and figured that there must be some earlier origin. I couldn’t imagine pre-1946 Italians doing the throw test; it would be too wasteful. Or would they just peel the thrown strand off the wall and toss it back into the pot?

Did the whitewashed stucco of Italian homes and the painted drywall of America have the same pasta-adherence properties? There was no practical way for me to find out. Nobody I knew in Italy tossed their pasta (at least while I was watching). I could test it at home, though. My New Jersey condo could—for this purpose, at least—be considered typically American and would be a perfect venue for pasta throwing. It was time to try it.

My first chance came when I was testing the pasta for the Albanian spaghetti recipe on page 237. I pulled two strands out of the pot at the same moment and tasted one; it wasn’t quite cooked. Then I tossed the other at a painted drywall surface. It didn’t stick.

This opened up a strange possibility: the chance that tossing strands of spaghetti at a wall was in fact a reliable way to determine if they were done. Did this method actually have merit? It wasn’t supposed to work; the experiment was supposed to have given me the opportunity to fill this page with snark—to make silly comments about old wives’ tales and 1970s cooking shows.

Two minutes later, when it was time to test again, I could see my whole noodle-cooking life flash before my eyes. I was reliving all those times I made fun of people who suggested that pasta tossing was the right way to go. The suspense was unbearable.

Once again, I tasted a strand and threw the other. It was cooked perfectly and stuck to the wall. Dubiosity flooded my mind … nay … it enveloped my entire body. My toes didn’t believe it and the hair on my head was skeptical too. The strand of spaghetti stayed stuck to the wall as if mocking all of my modernity, my sophistication, and my vast culinary knowledge.

I thought of visiting my wife’s cousins in Italy, offering to make them a pot of spaghetti as a thank-you for putting me up, and then throwing strands at their whitewashed stucco walls—to test the validity of pasta throwing in a traditional setting. I could just hear the cousins talking to my wife. “So this is what they pay your husband to do? And you resent the way our government gives out money?” Luckily, my shame was accompanied by restraint and I made no travel plans.

In the end, and even though I seemed to have learned something, I didn’t change my pasta-testing technique. Like Messisbugo, I say a short prayer and, just to make sure, I taste a strand or two. After all, the wall can’t tell you if you need to add more salt.

Smooth, brittle, and with the look of white Plexiglas, dry rice noodles represent a whole new world to most American cooks. Unlike noodles made from wheat, they need no cooking to be brought from dry to edible. Instead, in most cases, a simple soaking will do the job.

1. Find a bowl that’s about two to three times the volume of the noodles and put the noodles in the bowl.

2. Cover with hot tap water (100–115 degrees is fine), then let the noodles soak for 5 minutes. After that, give them a few stirs and try to pull them apart every 3 minutes or so until they’re tender. This will take about 20 minutes for fine noodles and longer for thicker. The thickest rice noodles can take 40 minutes or more.

3. When the noodles are tender, drain them. Give them a rinse in cold water, and drain them again. They should be able to stand about 30 minutes before they become too sticky to use.

If you try to speed things up with boiling water, the noodles will soften much faster, but they’ll get unpleasantly mushy too. I warned you!

There’s an exception; if you’re making a cold rice noodle salad like bún chay (page 150), you’ll want to either soak them in boiling water (as described in the recipe) or dunk the soaked noodles in boiling water for no more than 15 seconds. Follow that with a rinse in cold water and then let them drain until you use them—as quickly as possible, of course.

And if you’re among the lucky few who can get fresh rice noodles? I find that these are at their best for frying and salads with a quick 15 seconds in boiling water, a cold rinse, and a quick drain. In a soup, do nothing—just make sure the broth you pour over them is piping hot. They’ll be fine.

Gluten is a complex mixture of proteins and starches that helps many grain-based foods bind together. It’s what gives a great noodle its chew. If you are sensitive to gluten—as many people all over the world are—I encourage you to choose packaged noodle products that are specifically labeled “gluten free.” Do not assume that because it doesn’t have wheat, it doesn’t have gluten. Strive to become one of those people who read every label in the supermarket, and when you find products that work for you, the recipes here will be waiting and ready.