A Universe of Pasta

Last week I took a class on how to make pasta -- specifically, on how to make less-familiar shapes, such as garganelli, cavatelli, and corzetti. The class was taught by the wonderful guest chef Rosemary Hubbard at King Arthur Flour's education center in Vermont. With just four other students and two days to learn, Rosemary packed a lot into the class. And with each pasta we created, we also made an appropriate -- and tasty -- sauce. The first pasta we made was ricotta cavatelli, served with a garlicky roasted tomato and arugula sauce. Next, we made orecchiette, or little ears. This we dried overnight and then had for breakfast in the most elegant (and simple) carbonara sauce ever. No cream necessary. Our next project was gnocchi di patate, little fluffy pillows of potato pasta, served with a smoky pizzaiolo sauce. We also made buckwheat corzetti stampati. These little disks were rolled out and hand-stamped, and then served with an amazingly flavorful sauce of butter, marjoram and toasted pine nuts. Any extra dough was cut into fettuccine. One of the last pastas we made was garganelli, which looks somewhat like penne. The pasta was light and flavorful, and was tossed with a super simple crudaiola -- finely diced vegetables and herbs, lemon juice, olive oil, and salt and pepper that were warmed in the sun. Our final project, for which there is no picture (yum!), was uova da raviolo. This was one large raviolo that was filled with a mixture of ricotta and spinach and then a sunny, fat egg yolk. We cut fresh egg pasta out with large hen cookie cutters. The hens were filled, sealed, carefully cooked, and served with a drizzle of melted butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone