How to Make Pasta - Traditional Homemade Cavatelli With and Without Eggs

okay now we're going to proceed to making pasta [Music] typically i just like to buy it and use it out of the box but there are times when you want to make homemade pasta because it's fun and it gets your hands involved in something that you remember growing up with i can remember my grandmother making pasta all the time by hand and cutting everything by hand we're going to make two different types we're going to make an eggless pasta which is what you would typically buy in boxed pasta it's just a semolina and flour based pasta with water oil and salt and then we can make an egg based pasta which is what you typically would see when you see fettuccine it's a little richer and it does have a different texture than the eggless pasta so we're going to start with the eggless pasta and that means i don't need the eggs i'll put them aside and what i do need is flour oil salt and water that's all by the way i have cornmeal here which i will use later in the process when we actually start making the pasta cut so i'm going to set that aside with the eggs so i will use italian flour double zero which is a very fine flour and semolina or semola flour these are both made in naples by a company called caputo it's one of the most famous and probably most popular flowers used in italy where do you get them you can get just about anything you want if you really want to look for it on amazon including oils and all different types of ingredients so i take advantage of it and i don't have to go to the store to buy it can you use regular flour yes you can you don't need these my grandmother didn't use these she used all-purpose flour key is unbleached don't use bleach flour unbleached flour is the way to go okay because it gives your dough the proper gluten development and the proper texture we're going to start with the basic eggless pasta which is the just flour water salt and oil and what i have here is i have a large mixing bowl and i'll explain why i use that in this measuring cup you can probably see the stratification i have a cup of approximately a cup of double zero flour and a cup and a half of the semolina flour amounts to two and a half cups of flour is it plus or minus yeah because it's not doesn't have to be perfect what i do is i add this to my bowl now typically you would see the old italian ladies making a well in the center of their table i don't like to have to clean up that mess so what i do is i make my well right here first thing i want to do is i want to add a little salt to this and you need about a half a teaspoon i do measure salt and olive oil just so that i don't overdo it but if you're off a little bit you're off a little bit again salt with no iodide disperse it around the best you can not happy with the way it's mixed mix it together it's all going to come out in the mix anyway now the nice thing about the large bowl is i can make my well right in the bowl and it's contained and it doesn't go all over my countertop and if it spills over the size of the well i don't care well now we're going to add the liquid ingredients i'm going to start with warm water warm tap water i put about half of that into the well not bad and then i will add my tablespoon of olive oil okay let's get that out of the way and now comes the fun part getting your hands in here start to bring the flower into the center of the well mix it with your fingers and don't be afraid as you do this now it's going to get pretty clumpy and this is where you start to judge how much water you actually want to add i have never had to add more than one cup of water to this dough i had my son steven do this one day and he couldn't get over how all of a sudden it made a cohesive dough and you can see it's starting to get there already it's starting to clean the sides of the mixing bowl which is what you want it's got just enough moisture to pick up most of the flour you're starting to form the gluten that you're looking for you can see that this has already formed a pretty nice ball of dough nice thing about when it works this way is you can actually clean your bowl it comes out pretty nicely when you're done now comes the fun part a lot of people go hey no no it's not you got to work this thing you got to work it and make sure that you're putting your heart and soul into it it tells people that you've actually wanted to do something nice it takes anywhere between five and ten minutes of this physical activity to get the dough where you want it to be you want the dough to be tense you want to aggravate it get that gluten all tight and anxious to relax it's picked up everything i'm going to clean my hands while i'm at it too get all of that money that you put into this thing into the dough waste not want not i've cleaned my hands on more than one occasion today okay and we're doing this in the throes of cobid 19 so my hands are probably cleaner than they've ever been in their lives see it gives a little spring you started to get the gluten developed where you want it and my mother used to say you'll know when it's done you can't over knead it but you can underneath it i think we're just about there you can actually feel the dough changing to where it's not so grainy in your hands anymore and your hands are actually clean which means that it's picked up everything there's enough moisture in there to pick up all the flour and it's not crumbling on you just form it into a ball best you can this can rest for about a half hour or a little bit more if you can actually you can actually put this in the refrigerator refrigerate it for as much as overnight and be ready to use it when you use it but when you do if you take it out of the refrigerator give it about half hour to 45 minutes to come back to room temperature so that's our basic eggless pasta in a few minutes we'll go on and do our egg based pasta to be honest with you i don't do this very often so this is a crap shoot today let's see how it works if it goes as well as the other one we've hit it correctly what i have here is the flower which is a 50 50 blend of the italian double zero and just regular unbleached all-purpose flour a cup let's see it was a cup and one third of each you can see that i've made my well and i'm going to take the eggs four large eggs not extra large not medium but large and give them a quick beat and the size of the eggs is important because that will determine how much flour you use so if it calls for large eggs go with the recipe amounts of flour if you use extra large then you're going to have to adjust with more flour a few small eggs or medium eggs you're going to have to go with less flour so most recipes are based on straight large eggs i give them a good beat what i will do now is i will just add a touch of olive oil in here about a quarter to a half a teaspoon and a pinch of salt a good pinch of salt and i will mix that together and now comes the fun pour the egg mixture into the well and you can do this with a fork or you can do with your fingers whichever way you want to do it start incorporating the flour a little bit at a time from the well and this is where the egg dough is a little different and yet you just have to play with it a little differently eventually you'll actually use your hands and like i said i don't do this very often so i'm just going based on instinct at this point which is pretty much the essence of italian cooking i'm just going to bring it in a little bit at a time until the integrity of the well starts to collapse and i'll go in with my hands now when you need more flour you might when you start kneading and in that case what i'll do is i may add semolina flour as my bench flour now there's water set aside here in case the dough is too dry but you normally wouldn't add water here because your liquid component is the egg so let's see how that works out for us start bringing it together just like you did with the eggless version if it doesn't come together in a second or two and add just enough water to try and bring it together like the last time you can see that the dough is starting to form into a more cohesive mass and you know something a little bit will help not a lot we'll just take a dribble at a time until it comes together like any recipe that involves flour and ingredients of that type it all depends on the weather you're working with and today's a dry day so the flower is going to need a little extra moisture to do its job if we're a moist day then there would be moisture in the air and believe it or not the flower would actually pick that up english is my second language so if i screwed up here in my use of the english language i apologize why is it my second language because my mother and father worked and my grandmother my mother's mother raised me along with her husband my grandfather raised me in the sense that they were home all day while my mother and father worked and my grandmother was illiterate she couldn't speak a word of english so all i knew was the dialect of my parents hometown gaeda so when i went to school i went to kindergarten at four and a half i couldn't speak english it didn't take long and before i knew it i was interpreting for my teachers and my grandmother which was kind of a pain because my grandmother was there every day complaining about something and i had to learn early how to temper her temper if you want to know how good it is to cook sometimes do this kind of stuff because there's a feeling of satisfaction that you've done something that's different and you can tell your kids and your family and your friends hey i made this myself i made the pasta and they're going to say my that must have been hard you just tell them yeah it was really tough it took me five hours to make a dough i think we're there we're going to do the same thing with this now as we did with the other dough we're going to make it into a ball wrap it in plastic [Applause] and then we'll do something with it [Applause] very good besides if you know we made sauce there's always something to go with the sauce so we have two pastas uh what we're gonna do is make cavatelli which is basically little cave what it is it's like a gnocchi has like a little crevice in it so that the sauce can get caught in there now you can make them by hand by using your fingers like most of the old-time italians did or you can do them a more modern way with an old-fashioned italian cavatelli maker which i purchased in south philadelphia many years ago i can't even remember but i needed something to give to my wife to make gnocchi with and i found this place in philadelphia called junta brothers and i used to work in south philly so my buddy mike and i went there and i found it and i went to purchase it and the guy says 88 dollars i said okay here's my credit card he said no we don't do credit cards so luckily my buddy mike who came from south philly actually southwest philly always carried cash usually in denominations of hundreds and uh he was able to lend me 88 dollars for a few minutes until i was able to pay him back the next day and it's a crank you can hear the clicking there's a knife in the mechanism right there as the dough goes through the rollers it cuts it and shapes it into the shape of the cavitella you can see the grooves here which give the pasta grooves for the sauce to get caught into it so let's get this attached to our countertop and the trick is to make sure you catch the pasta somewhere and what i've got is a little uh glass tray here glass bowl here's the pasta this is the eggless dough that's been resting for a while i actually put it in the fridge for a while because it was getting to be over a half hour and i didn't want it to get too soft what you want to do here you want to cut your dough into pieces and i'm going to not cut it all but one piece at a time keep it covered so it doesn't dry out on you the cornmeal is in here also just to keep the pasta from sticking to itself and i have trays lined with parchment paper that i will transfer the cavitelli to once they've been formed and what you want to do is you want to roll your dough out and it seems to be rolling pretty nicely into a pencil nice little log about the thickness of a big pencil it's rolling nicely which means the dough worked pretty well and once you get going this doesn't take that long it's just you just have to be patient with it [Applause] and let it do its thing and here we go you stick it between the wooden wheels turn the crank and there they come and those are cavitelli sometimes you get a piece of dough that doesn't cut totally that's normal but you can see the little cave and the ridges i'll toss them in the cornmeal a bit i'll just spread them out onto the lined cookie sheet and you get about a pound to about a pound and a quarter from that dough that we made that's plenty to feed four people now we'll just keep doing this until we're through with the dough we're about ready to cook the pasta that we made as you recall we laid them out on trays with cornmeal so that they would dry they've been drying for a little over an hour an hour and a half that's about right if you want to freeze them i would dry them longer you need to get the cornmeal off of the pasta as best you can so i use a slotted spoon of some sort shake it off put it into a colander we'll finish this off by just shaking you can see that there's still some coming out i want something with big enough holes so that the cornmeal will go through and a nice colander usually does the trick now we transfer it over to a bowl that we're going to use to transfer to the boiling water first thing you want to do is get a lot of water boiling in each pot you the trick with pasta of any kind is to not use small amounts of water use as much water as you can because you want the boiling action to get the pasta moving and cooking the other thing is you want to salt your water when it boils and the italians say the water should be the taste of seawater when you use it so this is your chance to salt the pasta after this you really can't anymore so now we're ready to roll i have my eggless pasta here and i have my egg based dough pasta here so we're going to dump them in see how they stayed separated there's one and you don't want to lose the boil so what you're going to do is you're going to put your lid back on talk that way at high heat until it starts to boil again and do the same thing here now fresh pasta tends to cook quickly so they say that once it comes to the top or it rises to the surface it's done uh yes and no it depends on how hard the pasta is when you make it i probably would say check it at that point if it still tastes like raw flour you're not there yet the other thing we're doing is we have sauce ready to go and two skillets basically i put in four ladles of sauce in each skillet just to have them ready for to dress the pasta when it's time and it's been heated up and here's our master batch warm and ready to roll should we need more sauce now one last point don't over sauce your pasta the pasta is supposed to be the protagonist in the dish not the sauce if you want to add extra sauce do it after you plate your sauce pasta but the reality of it is italians like to taste their pasta and use the sauce more as an accompaniment to the pasta itself we're going to keep the pasta water in case we need it if it's too dry in the pan we can add a little bit of the pasta water because we're going to finish cooking the pasta in the sauce that's how you get pasta that's al dente you undercook it in the water to a point was just harder than which you would like it to be and then from there you transfer it to the pan with the sauce and finish cooking it in the sauce and if you need to add some water from the pasta pot this is the time to do it let's check this one that way i know which one will cook more quickly not bad this one's a little harder you've been cooking for about the same time and i'll give this another minute on that side and then we'll probably be ready to toss that one and then this one will be ready to go and the texture as you can see is they're firm they're not falling apart they're holding their shape and they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do okay i'm going to chance it now i got the flame up a little bit on the sauce i'm going to drain it still with a little bit of the water left on the pasta doesn't look like i'm going to need any water here so i'm going to let the pasta cook a little bit and absorb the moisture from the sauce pasta you can see it's starting to simmer a little bit and when it looks creamy you're about there okay now we finish turn off the flame on both of them give this a toss and now we put some cheese on each one never add cheese to pasta that's cooking turn off your flame this is pecorino romano i've chosen this one because it's typical of the southern part of italy where this pasta is typical and made usually it's a sheep's milk cheese which has a very strong smell odor but it's very tasty and it's got a saltiness to it like most sheep milk cheeses do parmigiano reggiano or even grana padano that's cow's milk cheese they're milder and they require maybe a little more on the pasta than you would normally put on i just let put a little bit on there to bind the pasta up and then people can put more on their plate as they wish this is a good time to add just a little bit of the essence of basil right to the pan you can get that fragrance of the basil coming off from the hot pasta you can always add more in the dish but i like to do it right in here and the other thing it does is it reminds you of the colors of the italian flag [Applause] and there we are i have to taste it if i cooked it i have to taste it right you want to give it to your guests when it's no good so which one should we do first eggless is that middle one we've been doing first anyway chewy the sauce is very nice it's sweet on its own without any added sugar the cheese of course gives you that saltiness and the basil just gives you this beautiful fragrance the texture is just the way i like it very al dente now let's try this one a little firmer you can definitely taste the egg very good both of them do i have a choice yeah both i'd eat either one anytime so i hope you've enjoyed watching this and try it just at home it's not that hard just make yourself a morning with your dough the flour and your water

Channel: Paulie Stags

Views: 18,561

Keywords: How to make pasta, pasta with egg, pasta without egg, eggless pasta, Pasta (Recipe), Pasta (Food), Spaghetti, Cooking (Interest), Italian Food (Industry), Recipe, Food Network (TV Network), Mario Batali (Chef), Macaroni, Italy (Country), Olive Oil (Ingredient), homemade, Cavatelli, Italian food recipe, lidia bastianich (chef), Paulie Stags, Paul Stamegna, Andrew Stamegna, Bertolli (food brand), homemade pasta, giada de laurentiis (chef), Caputo (food brand)

Id: n-yJjuhUdw8

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021