November and it’s raining cookbooks. Hardly a day goes by without a delivery person showing up at my door with a flat cardboard box. Publishers send me their latest issues, hoping I will pay attention to them NRC . Friendly and unfriended authors email, text and message me about their youngest book babies. “Are you coming to the launch party?” “Shall I send you the PDF in advance?” “I’m so curious what you think about it.”
Very nice and honorable of course, that’s not the point. And I also understand it very well: when a new book of mine comes out, my publisher and I do the same. A book like that can easily take up a year of your life. A year of work, the necessary blood and sweat, sometimes even a few tears and of course a lot of hope and expectation. But if I wanted to discuss all those new cookbooks – between 800 and 1,000 titles are published every year – I would only be spoon-feeding recipes from others.
Still, I thought it would be fun, and educational for both you and myself, to try out a few different things. Every chef has his own taste preferences, favorite ingredients, experience, expertise, beliefs, showpieces, tricks and blind spots, your Saturday receptionist is no exception. How long has it been since I shared a recipe for homemade pasta here? I am, I honestly admit, just not a pasta queen. But it is all the more refreshing to step out of your comfort zone and surrender to the skills of people who are good at it.
We’re going to be cooking from cookbooks for the rest of this month, and today is that day Pasta by Maud Moody and Leonardo Pacenti. They are the owners of the Amsterdam restaurant Toscanini and also published together a few years ago The bible of Italian cuisine. If you thought you could spend the rest of your life in the kitchen, think again Pasta requires two lives. There are at least ten recipes for pasta with tomato sauce alone.
The recipe from Moody and Pacenti is pleasantly precise and reliable. I chose an autumnal oven pasta, cannelloni with radicchio, ricotta and walnuts and my only comment is that an oven dish of 20 x 30 centimeters is a bit tight if you want to fit all the rolls in one layer. Because the instructions take up a lot of space, we’ll start here by making the dough. For 450 grams of pasta dough you need: 150 grams of flour typo 00 + a little extra for dusting (this is extra finely ground wheat flour), 150 grams of semolino (also called semolina: this is coarsely ground wheat flour, or semolina) and 3 Eggs.
Mix the flour and semolino/a on the work surface and make a well in the center. Crack the eggs into it and gently beat them with a fork. Using the fork, mix the beaten eggs from the inside with the flour. When everything is mixed, continue to knead the dough by hand into an elastic, cohesive dough. This takes about 10 minutes. If it is too dry, add some water and if it is too wet, add some extra flour. Form the dough into a ball and wrap it in plastic wrap. Let rest for 30 minutes at room temperature.
#comfort #zone