Week 7: Handmade Tortellini

Hi Everyone!

A visual depiction of my
previous pasta making
experience

This week I decided to handmake pasta. Since I love making my life harder, I decided to fold my own tortellini! My past, rather disastrous attempts of handcrafting pasta took place when I was thirteen, and each time my family ended up eating dinner at about 9 at night.

Where did I learn to make pasta? Two words: Jamie Oliver, my first culinary crush. I fell in love with him when I was ten, watching Jamie at Home, with my mother on our boxy TV. His first ever cook book, The Naked Chef, was also the first cook book I ever owned. Unfortunately, I've only ever tried a couple of its recipes. It was all a bit too intense for a twelve year old, who didn't even know what polenta was. Five years on, I'm still not certain about polenta’s origins, but I decided to revisit The Naked Chef and get some bang for my buck.

Filling

The filling was roasted butternut pumpkin, basil, ricotta and parmesan. It was absolutely delicious! Also did you know that they call pumpkins ‘squashes’ in the UK? You learn something new every day.

Pasta

I was hoping that pasta making would be easier than it was in my youth, but I knew in my heart of hearts that I was going to make a right mess of it. The seeming effortlessness of pasta rolling and shaping in the MasterChef kitchen completely dumbfounds to me. I don’t know what sort of universe two metres of flimsy, wafer thin dough behaves itself in, but it certainly doesn’t cooperate at my house.

My dough was sticky and in constant need of flour. Sheer laziness and exasperation, drove me to neglecting these cries for flour and I was punished with tears in both my dough and eyes. My cheapo pasta machine is older than I am; it wobbled on the benchtop and my night was punctuated with the occasional clang of the temperamental metal handle hitting the tiles below.

I needed more patience and four more arms. I recruited my lovely mother, who fulfilled the patience quota and supplied two of the required limbs.

Shh...they're totally identical

Folding was another nightmare and a half. I stupidly thought, ‘I can make Chinese dumplings, this will be a breeze.’ Once again, I was a fool. The dough was unforgiving. Since I didn't have a suitably sized circle cookie cutter, I used poorly cut squares (rectangles), to craft my tortellini. Consistency has never been a strength of mine, and the shapes of my tortellini were further proof of this.

Due to my substandard folding skills, many burst when submerged in boiling water. Once cooked, they looked like a pack of wrinkly pugs. A pack of sad, saggy pugs.

Never judge a book by its cover: they looked like wrinkly dogs, but thankfully didn't taste like it.

Rating rubric

Taste: 8/10- the pasta was actually quite light, and the filling was delicious.

Presentation/resemblance to dish: 2/10- my poor ugly, little bundles

Time: 1/10- my family ate at a somewhat acceptable time of 7:50pm. However, I started cooking at 4:30pm.

Kitchen Mess: 3/10- I cleaned up half way through, so it could've been a lot worse.

I hope you all recover from the shock and grief of Nidhi’s elimination. Enjoy Nigella week everybody!

Cheers,

Rosa