What's Cooking With Dive? Pig Fat Pasta

Three guesses what we're making this week!

Yeah, okay, so maybe the title gave it away …

This post is respectfully dedicated to Katherine, who at the moment is unable to eat certain things including cake (AUGH!), pork and pasta.
I'm crap at cakes (legacy of having a mum who bakes constantly and incomparably; I've never had to learn), so here, especially for Katherine is Dive's own "Pig Fat Pasta".

As you all know by now, I am a lazy-assed cook. When I get home just before bedtime after my crap commute I often turn to a bag of dried organic pasta as a time-saver, but back in the days when I had a life I used to make my own pasta all the time.

So as part of my ongoing quest to get my life back I've decided to do what good Italian mamas do and make a monthly batch of my own, eat some and freeze the rest.
The advantage of home-made over bought stuff is that bought, dried pasta - even the good organic stuff - is made with water and not eggs.
Ironically, this makes even better "al dente" pasta than home-made for certain dishes, but it doesn't taste anywhere near as nice.

Some of you may make your own pasta and you'll know that once or twice a month is quite enough for all that mess and effort, but that it is definitely worth doing as a treat.

In the good old days I used to roll all mine by hand, but since I bought Phil a pasta roller a few years back, which he actually uses, I decided to invest in one for myself.
Hoorah for the recession and half-price cookware sales!

Anyhoo, get your pinnies on and let's head for the kitchen and make a mess.

First up: Ingredients.
All organic, as ever, and as local as possible.
Onion, garlic, eggies, 00 pasta flour, lardons, Prosciutto, Gran Padano and Parmesan cheeses and some Kalamata olives on the side.

What we're making with that lot will be home-made Prosciutto di Parma e Gran Padano Tortellini (that's ham and cheese but it sounds so much sexier in Italian) simply cooked with garlic, onion and organic smoked bacon fatty lardons.
Pig Fat Pasta.

Later on, I might get into classic sauces, green spinach pasta, black squid ink pasta, red tomato and brown wholemeal pasta and lots of other related things that make for a delicious meal and a cheap photopost.
Today, however, we're doing basic pasta making so we'll dispense with any sauces and keep things plain dumb simple, just the way I like 'em.

For anyone who may not have made pasta at home before, this is one of the most fun ways you can possibly spend an hour or so of your weekend (and a lot of that hour is spent just sitting about). It's a truly awesome thing to do if you have someone over for coffee and a chat; two people can have even more fun than one making pasta.
Lotsa mess; lotsa laughs.

So …
As we're making tortellini, we're going to need something to stuff them with.
Today's theme is pig fat, so let's choose one of the finest culinary pinnacles pig fat can attain and grab some Prosciutto di Parma.
We're talking at least two year old matured and of course we're talking organic.
You want flavour? This is a wafer-thin, concentrated taste-orgasm.
Chop it up nice and finely.

Add to that a finely grated wodge of Gran Padano cheese (we're saving the Parmesan to serve it with).
Mix well (added bonus points of licking your fingers clean. Cookie dough got NOTHING on this)!

Done that?
Right … Eggies!
Organic, local, yadda, yadda …
I don't usually specify amounts (other than the glop, the sploosh, the roughly-a-handful and the about yay much) but it kinda makes sense here, so for my pasta session today I'll be using 300grams (that's around ten and a half ounces in real money) of organic "00" pasta flour ("farina di grano tenero" if you wanna be pretentious and I usually do) and I'll add to that two whole eggs and one extra yolk (for yumminess).

The white from the third egg can go in with the filling to make it easier to work.
Oh, and don't waste those shells! Crunch 'em all up and put 'em on the garden around hostas and cabbages; like coffee grounds, slugs can't bear eggshells.

Hokay … Sieve your flour onto a board or clean worktop. You want to make it into a cute little mountain and then bash the top in to form a volcano. Yay! Back to kiddie cooking!

Into the caldera of your volcano go the two and a half eggies. If you do it right, they stay in focus but if your hands are covered in flour your camera might sulk a bit like mine did.

You can use your fingers from the start if you like but I prefer to break up the yolks with a fork and start it off that way, gradually incorporating more of the flour into the eggs.

Which is very relaxing, if slightly gross to look at.

When you can't contain your childish excitement any longer, get your fingers in there and start having some serious gloopy fun.

After a while, you'll end up with a sticky, floury ball and a load of leftover flour (important).

Now comes the fun part.
This is what pasta making is all about. This is why Italian mamas don't have to spend time down the gym to get forearms like Popeye's.
Get kneading!
YAY!

My stupid, cheapo digital camera decided that "Way Overexposed" was the correct setting for these and who am I to argue with a piece of plastic crap?

Keep on kneading until your forearms inflate, remembering to keep changing hands at ninety-nine.

After a while, your dough will start to feel more elastic and silky and less lumpy and floury.
Time to really put the hammer down and take out all those anger management issues.

When you can poke your finger into the dough and it springs straight back out, your pasta and yourself are both ready for a rest.

This is what all that effort has produced. A kinda doughy lump.

Some people wrap their doughy lump in clingfilm and pop it in the fridge for half an hour.
I prefer to cover it with a damp teatowel and leave it where I can see it.
Time to chill out with a coffee and the paper.

I gave my lump around forty minutes and then got that leftover flour and sieved some onto the worktop (having cleaned off all the doughy crap first).

In the good old days when I had a big enough kitchen and a really long rolling pin I would roll all my pasta by hand, but now the longest piece of worktop I have is only around four feet so it's machine time.
A lot of people have an "unwanted gift" pasta roller or a "we thought it looked nice but we never use it" pasta roller tucked away somewhere and now we're going to get that out and play with it.

Anyone here have "Play-Doh"™ when you were kids?
This is just the same, except you can eat it this time around.

So …
Let's rip that dough ball into two and give the first lump a quick roll, leaving the rest under the damp cloth for later.

Clamp your pasta roller to your worktop and open it to its widest setting, then simply crank the dough through it.
Simplissimo.

Close it down a notch and squeeze it some more.
You really want to then put it back on the wide setting, fold the pasta in half and then repeat the process several times on the two widest settings.
This conditions the pasta nicely and helps it keep its shape rather than just springing back. If you've ever rolled it by hand you know just how frustrating it can be when you've at last got it to condom thin-ness and you breathe a huge sigh of satisfaction, only for it to spring back to four times as thick as you want it.

Once you've run the dough through the widest settings a few times, folding it and re-pressing it, you can work your way down through the settings, squeezing your pasta thinner and thinner each time.

You might notice it getting a bit long.

Or even a lot long … In fact by the time this little doughball is done it will be a little over eight feet long.

For things like spaghetti and lasagne you'll want the second from thinnest setting, but for stuffed pasta like tortellini, you want it so thin you can read your paper through it, so you go right down to the thinnest setting.

If you want to make wide sheet pasta, when it's reached the thinnest setting, simply fold it neatly and start again with the thickest and you should get nice, square-edged lasagne sheets.

Today, though, we want an eight foot long, three inch wide strip for the three inch circular pastry cutter to play with.

Thusly.

Now's the time to add your filling.

Kinda like this. I added some fresh parsley from the windowcill to the Prosciutto and Gran Padano and eggwhite mixture and then plonked a glob onto each little pasta circle.

Next, slightly moisten the edge closest to you and fold the little circle in half, pressing lightly to seal the edges.

Simply wrap the thing around your finger …

And lo … a tortellini (or whatever the singular of tortellini might be … a tortellino, perhaps).
Whichever of you at the back of the room who said it looks like a vagina is going to get a slap after class.

Set those little guys out to dry. Turn them over after ten minutes or so to let them dry out evenly.
If you're going to be cooking them later in the day, pop 'em in the fridge. If you don't they tend to come apart when you put them on to boil and you end up with a wet soup of your filling and some floating pasta circles.

While they were drying I made some more. Four times this amount in the end, plus a load of tagliatelle, all for the freezer for treats later in the month.

Now let's get cooking!

Heat up a non-stick pan or wok and whop in a handful of nice fatty lardons.
No oil; we're cooking our Pig Fat Pasta in pig fat.
F L A V O U R !
Lean meat is just an exercise in chewing; all the flavour is in the fat, which is why nicely marbled beef is pricier than lean.
People forget that simple fact. Eat fatty meat for flavour but eat less of it than you would eat lean. You'll be just as healthy and a whole lot happier.

Oh, and of course, this has got to be organic. If you use factory "chemo-pork substitute" and whap it in the pan like this you'll end up with an unpleasant watery soup as that stuff has at least twenty percent water added by weight after all the chemicals.
Cheap "meat" is a false economy.
"Like a Sunday in T.J.
It's cheap but it's not free …"
as Steely Dan so nicely put it.
It's certainly not something I want to put in my mouth!

Anyhoo … While that's sizzling nicely, plop your pasta into some boiling water (not salted, unless you like everything to taste of salt, which I don't … add it at the table if you really can't survive without it).

Get a good sizzle going with your lardons and then toss in an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, turn down the heat and let the onion sweat clear.

When the pasta is done (four minutes), drain it and add what have become entertainingly mutated tortellini mis-shapes to the pan and stir them around until they're liberally coated in pig fat (don't let the term gross you out; if you eat bacon, you'll LOVE this).

Then simply add shaved Parmesan and olives, plate it up and eat it up.
Yummy!
Rich, eggy home-made pasta, perfectly al dente.
With pig fat.
Old Dive's Pig Fat Pasta.

Enjoy!