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May 02, 2006
Tie Racks Make Great Pasta-Drying Racks
...and while I'm offering budget kitchen tips, wine bottles make great rolling pins, too.
At least a decade ago, I helped a friend make pasta with her pasta maker, and I remembered it being so ridiculously easy. You just put the dough through this metal thing with rollers a few times, then you put it through a thing that slices it into strips, throw it in some boiling water and poof, you have spaghetti.
Obviously my memory is selective. We invited some pasta-maker-savvy people over for dinner on Saturday to help us not screw things up (thank goodness), but I vastly underestimated the time it takes to process flour and eggs into something edible and cooked. I somehow entirely blocked out the part where dough must be made and then must be kneaded (so demanding, this dough) and then must "rest" (comfortably, undisturbed, and presumable quite content to be holding up dinner while it gets beauty sleep under a dishtowel in its own private bowl).
While I felt a bit guilty about making them wait for hours for dinner, it's a good thing we had six people in our apartment, since it took four to run the pasta-making operation. First, I assembled dough (using the crowd-pleasing flour-volcano mixing method). Then, the dough got quality time in the bowl, resting. Then I rolled the dough out into 10" x 20" strips with a wine bottle because I had forgotten about the pasta-dough rolling part and didn't imaging myself needing a rolling pin until my pie-making retirement years.
At some point during the dough-making operation, we realized we didn't have any sort of rack to dry the pasta on (I had forgotten about that, too). We don't own a dish drying rack because we are lucky enough to have a dishwasher (and thank god for that, given all of the cooking experiments going on around here). So Derek disappeared and then reappeared a few minutes later with something that looked absolutely perfect: his empty tie rack. Rigged to hang from a cabinet door, it worked nicely.
So while I was rolling away, a friend anchored the pasta machine to our wine cabinet and supervised the dough-lengthening operation. One person would load the strip of dough into the top of the machine and crank it through and another would catch it. When the dough made it to the linguine stage, it was transfered (with a good deal of fanfare) to the pasta drying-tie-rack, where someone separated the pieces so they wouldn't stick.
For anyone not familiar with pasta machines: Here's a primer. A pasta maker has two parts. One is made of two smooth metal rods which can be adjusted to be closer and closer together. You start on a wide setting and keep feeding the dough through on narrower settings until it's good and long. when you're happy with the thickness of the dough, you move your sheet of pasta dough (which, miraculously, does not tear easily) to the second part of the machine. This part can split your sheet into linguine-sized noodles (or maybe it's tagliatelle?) or spaghetti-sized ones. We went with linguine, since that works well for carbonara.
The finished product was good, though a bit mushy for my taste (possibly because they were too thin or not dry enough?). And we made twice as much as we needed. But at least I know how the thing works now, and I'm very grateful for the help in figuring it out (and the patience of people who kept hearing about yummy food but didn't see anything edible materialize for quite some time). I think I'd like to try pappardelle or lasagna next time, since I love wide fresh pasta in restaurants.
Posted by csageday at May 2, 2006 11:58 PM
Comments
I was proud that I came up with the tie rack idea before Francis did.
Posted by: D at May 2, 2006 11:22 PM