Learning to Make Fresh Pasta

This is the fresh parpadelle I made.

Yesterday I took a basic fresh pasta class at the Institute for Culinary Education (formerly Peter Kump's) on 23rd Street between 5th and 6th Aves. It's the second cooking class I've taken, and the first at ICE. I took a From the Greenmarket class at the New School last year, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The New School class seemed more like a bunch of people getting together to cook a huge meal from ingredients at the farmers' market; the class I took yesterday seemed slightly more like being in cooking school. They have big kitchens with multiple stainless steel tables and professional-ish equipment, and we each got to make our own batch of fresh pasta. Yesterday we were left to our own devices to a greater degree, which is a little annoying when you've got a time limit in an unfamiliar kitchen, but is kind of nice, too. It's like they have a little faith in our abilities.

Anyway, making fresh pasta is definitely something I'll try to do again here at home. You start with 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour. Then, using a fork, beat three eggs with 1 teaspoon salt. Make a well in the flour and pour in the egg mixture. Then, using the fork you used to beat the eggs, continue to stir the eggs, incorporating more and more of the flour until it starts to resemble dough. Then start grabbing and kneading it with your hands, incorporating as much of the flour as you can. Turn it out of the bowl and continue to work it until it feels smooth and dry, almost a little rubbery. You'll be amazed at how stiff and dry the dough is; you can add water if necessary, but I didn't need to (I kept thinking I needed to, but when I broke the dough ball open, the inside was still a little sticky). Then you have to leave it alone for at least half an hour, wrapped in plastic in the refrigerator.

We made chicken ragu, a 4-cheese sauce, a tomato and basil sauce and, my favorite, ricotta ravioli with sauteed Swiss chard and arugula. The filling consisted of 2 cups ricotta, 1/4 cup grated Parmesan, 2 tablespoons minced flat-leaf parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Then you sautee garlic in oil and add Swiss chard, arugula, salt and pepper and cook until the greens are wilted.

Each group made all four sauces, so all four of us at my table were racing around at this point, trying to get all the sauces done in time. After the sauces were completed, we used pasta machines to roll out the dough and cut the shapes, flouring the pasta and putting it on a floured rimmed baking sheet when it was finished. For the ravioli, you roll the pasta out into sheets, make mounds of the filling along one long side of the sheet, brush the top of the other long side of the sheet with beaten egg, and fold it over, pushing out the air as you seal the top layer of pasta around each mound of filling. Then cut into rustic ravioli squares.

Then you cook it up in boiling water, toss it in a saute pan with one of the sauces, and voila! We didn't learn how to hand-roll pasta, which is what I'm going to have to do (too bad, because using the pasta maker was pretty easy and it seems like hand-rolling it is really impractical). It's so satisfying, though, to make your own pasta, and fresh pasta is such a different taste and texture than dried.