Although I loved the way the book was written, I could only find one recipe that was tame enough for me to attempt in my own kitchen. The overall collection of recipes is predominantly gourmet and special occasion. In general, the recipes rely on esoteric ingredients and unusual combinations. For example, the “ultimate stay at home in your sweats, snowy winter evening comfort food” is braised beef cheeks, which takes six to seven hours for the cheeks to braise. There are recipes with escargot, foie gras, squab, sweetbreads, duck legs, and other ingredients that would be difficult to find at the local supermarket and challenging to prepare on a weeknight.
Past Experience with Pasta Dough
A few weeks ago, I decided to attempt the basic pasta dough in order to make the recipe for Tagliatelle with Champignon Sauce. I’ve made homemade pasta before, so that didn’t seem to far out of the realm of possibility for me. The first time in recent memory was at the local cooking school about two years ago, when my really good friend and her crew invited me to join them for a half-price class on ravioli. The chef-instructor was a disaster and we all swore never to take a class with him again! (Fortunately, he seems to have been replaced at the cooking school.) But at least I got the practice in making the dough and working with a manual pasta machine.
The second time in recent memory was last year, when my father had made too much pasta dough and gave me the leftovers so I could finish the process at my house. All that really took was the patience to run the dough through my manual pasta machine to make the sheets thin enough to run it through the cutting side of the machine. That experiment turned out well, even though I didn’t let the pasta dry sufficiently, because Dad had made a good quality dough.
However, the sum total of what I remembered from both experiences was that making homemade pasta was a time intensive task. Whether or not that is actually true, fear of the time commitment, as well as a recurring cold, kept me from beginning the process. By the time I was actually well enough and available to make the pasta, the mushrooms that I had bought had turned and needed to be replaced.
Time to Make the Dough
When I finally found a Sunday afternoon that I was feeling free and well, I mentally committed to doing the work of making the homemade pasta and the mushroom sauce. I excavated my manual pasta machine from underneath the clutter on the sideboard and then bought new mushrooms during my afternoon shopping. And then I took a nap!
After slightly caffeinating myself, I started the pasta dough. However, before I could even start working on the dough, I needed to conquer the ingredients list: one cup of wheat flour, one cup of all purpose flour, two large eggs, and seven egg yolks. I’m hit or miss with separating eggs, so I felt a little trepidation at separating so many. Fortunately, I used the three bowl method – separate over a bowl, put the yolks in a bowl, pour the clean egg whites into a bowl – so that step came off flawlessly. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with seven egg whites, aside from making a lot of divinity, but I separated those into three jars – two, two, three - just in case I would be able to use them in the next week.
The books called for making the dough on a clean countertop, but I opted to start it in a very large glass bowl, which was large enough for me to fit my hands in to knead the dough after it initially came together. The recipe instructions were first to mix the eggs into the flour gradually with a fork starting in the center of the eggs, and then to knead until the dough felt like Play-Doh. When I achieved that, I sealed the ball of dough in a Ziploc and transferred it to the refrigerator to rest.
Cutting the Noodles
As soon as the dough was resting, I started the mushroom sauce. The first step was to sweat the mushrooms in batches until they started to produce liquid. Each batch was dropped into a colander in the sink with its friends to drain for 20 minutes or so. I’ve never cooked mushrooms like this before, but, according to the headnote, this method is superior to any other way of cooking white button mushrooms. So I gave it a try.
Shortly after I had all the mushrooms sweated and in the colander, it was time to run the past dough through the machine and turn it into real pasta. I was so excited because I love using the manual pasta machine. It is so satisfying to turn the crank and see the pasta threads come out – just like an adult Play-Doh toy! According to the recipe, I had to run the dough through at the widest setting (one on my machine) for ten to fifteen times first, folding it in half after each run. I’ve never done that before, but after doing it with the first quarter of the dough, I could understand why it was necessary. It was like one last knead on the dough to take it from stiff to supple. Once the dough was through that step, then it was supposed to go one pass through each of the following stages until I could see my hand through the sheet. That took me to the seven setting on my machine. Although I was supposed to hand cut the sheet into quarter-inch wide noodles, I just ran it through the fettucine setting on the cutting side of my machine. Then I set those noodles on a cookie sheet to stay out of the way and to dry a touch.
After I finished half the dough, which filled one cookie sheet full of noodles, I gave some serious consideration to setting aside the other half of the dough for another day. I already had more noodles than I could eat for dinner! But then I thought that it might be best to finish the project and just set the extra noodles aside for another day if it turned out to be too much.
Finishing the Sauce
I will admit that I cheated big time when it came to following the recipe for the mushroom sauce. I did put the mushrooms back into the pan and sauté them with a few shakes of dried thyme until golden, but I skipped the red pearl onions, the shallots (even though I had bought them), and the garlic. It turned out that I had used all my minced garlic and had forgotten to replace the jar, but I was too eager to finish the recipe to chop fresh garlic. So I went straight from sautéing the mushrooms to deglazing the pan.
Unfortunately, when I went to use my levered wine opener to open a bottle of inexpensive red wine to deglaze the pan, there was a bit of a SNAFU. The lever pushed the cork into the bottle, and red wine spurted up through the neck at me! Although this didn’t make too much of a mess – I was working the lever slowly – it was still annoying. Then the cork jammed in the neck of the bottle while I was trying to measure out the deglazing liquid, and that caused it to spurt all over the kitchen. But eventually, I was able to dislodge the cork from the neck of the bottle, pour wine normally, and carry on with the recipe. I also cheated in measuring the white vermouth for the deglazing liquid: the recipe called for two teaspoons and, rather than measure a small amount twice, I opted to measure out one tablespoon. I didn’t think it would make that much of a difference!
After the pan was deglazed, I had to hunt for chicken broth to simmer the mushrooms. Luckily, there was a carton in my Horde Cabinet (which has yet to be purged for the new year!). Again, I opted to use one tablespoon rather than two teaspoons when it came to measuring the red wine vinegar for the simmer. No need to be super fussy about measurements when I’m not baking.
The recipe said to add the cream when the chicken stock was reduced by one-third. I really couldn’t tell when that was, because I didn’t pay close attention to the initial volume of the chicken stock. I just let it go for about ten minutes and then moved on to the next step, which was adding the heavy cream. That was supposed to simmer until it “coated the back of the spoon,” which was estimated to take between ten and fifteen minutes. So I set a timer for fifteen minutes and set about doing something else.
When I came back to the pan, the cream had almost all evaporated. I wasn’t quite sure whether it coated the back of the wooden spoon that I was using to stir the sauce, but there wasn’t much left of it to thicken any further. I turned off the heat and finished the sauce by stirring in a whole eight ounces of crème fraiche. The recipe called for four ounces, but I couldn’t think what I would do with the remaining four ounces, so into the pan it went!
The Finale
Since it looked like there were three or four nights of dinner in the pan, I opted to leave the other half of the homemade pasta on the cookie sheet to dry out some. Before bed, I packaged it up in a Ziploc and slipped it into the freezer for future use.
The Verdict
The homemade pasta with mushroom sauce was delicious! And I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to make the homemade pasta dough. I may do it more often in the future, unless I can’t find uses for the leftover egg whites.
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