The Obligatory Pasta Post

In the Galliani household, pasta is served twice a day, 6 to 7 days a week, with occasional exceptions. That's roughly 100% of all meals, because breakfast doesn't count as a meal in Italy.

Sometimes stereotypes pale in comparison to the truth. The glorious, mouth-watering truth.

I hope you don’t think I’m terrible, but it’s actually been nearly a month since BCSP took us on a field trip to an agriturismo farmhouse so that we could learn to make pasta. The photos have been sitting in my hard drive, getting more and more out of date, but there has been so much other stuff going on! (As for post frequency, you’re all getting rather spoilt, I think—three posts in three days!)

The bus ride was a crazy ride up into the mountains near Bologna, up slippery dark roads coated with heavy snow. We were grateful to get inside the farmhouse, which was warm and homey, exactly what you think of when you think rustic Italy. There was not a single wall or ceiling in the entire place that was not made with brick, which was a very cool aesthetic. Unfortunately, the place had double-booked the class, so there were close to seventy of us packed around the table, looking doubtfully at the six workspaces on the table.
Clearly not everyone would have a go.

The decor was cool, though.

The mini-lesson was taught by a group of women describable only as Pasta Grandmothers. The magic ratio, they explained to us, is one etto (100g) of flour per egg. Then they rolled up their sleeves, broke their eggs into the flour, and went to work, explaining in bits and pieces as they went. Julie was called on and put to work making a batch of dough, followed by other BCSP students, all diligently kneading away. Bianca and I had to content ourselves as spectators, this time.

One of the Grandmothers.

To make fresh pasta dough, you pile your flour (00-type, ideally) onto the biggest board you have and make a well in the center to break the eggs into. Then you mix them in with a fork, very, very gradually. Then you knead.

Notice that the egg yolks in Italy are more red than yellow. That's what happens when your chickens aren't fed on sawdust and dirty tissues.

Pasta dough is about as simple as you can get at just two ingredients, but any quick-n-easy allure it might have had is negated by the fact that it takes a quarter hour of kneading for a 250g batch. And you can’t really use a dough-hook to do the work for you…it takes genuine manpower to stretch and turn the dough to properly develop the gluten. The Grandmothers laughed at complaints of sore wrists and told the kneaders to stand with one foot behind the other and slightly bent over the board, so that you could “put your back into it.” Small wonder—they all had forearms that could snap chair legs.

After Julia had exhausted herself on the kneading, one of the Grandmothers handed her a rolling pin at least a yard long.

This, she said, is for two things: rolling pasta dough, and beating your husband.

(I believe it. D:) Lauren brandishing, Tiffany scheming.

So after the kneading, there is about another quarter hour of rolling, and rolling, and rolling. Pasta rollers did not make an appearance in this kitchen. The whole process from flour to finished dough takes at least half an hour.

Halfway between thumbs-up and OW HAND OW. In the background, a Grandmother watches on attentively.

…I can’t WAIT to do this myself. I couldn’t stop watching the head Grandmother, who in the dim kitchen could tell exactly where the weaknesses were in her 500g batch of dough, and rolled out every blemish in her sheet of dough, which must have been four square feet. More photos here.

With the finished pasta sheets, we learnt how to make the classic pasta shapes—tagliatelle are made by rolling up the sheet and slicing it to form noodles, farfalle (“butterflies,” known in the US as bow-ties) with a simple pinch of a square-cut piece of dough, ravioli like a pasta sandwich, and tortellini with a clever wrap around the thumb.

Tasty! says Mariella.

After two hours of pasta-making, we sat down to a three-hour dinner of the pasta we’d just made,  complete with wine that had been grown and bottled right on the farm (delicious). 

All thoroughly enjoyable, and we were all very warm and sleepy for the ride back, which was just as well, because the bus didn’t run that late (1 a.m.) when we got back, so I had to walk home with another girl, Christina, who also lives on San Donato.

It was an hour’s tough walk through the snow, but not a single drop of water got through my Uggs, and my feet stayed toasty all the way home. And hey, I worked off all those calories!