Let’s Roll

Now that you’ve tried making homemade pasta sauce with ribs, you need to make some pasta worthy enough to share its plate.  A good quality store bought pasta is fine but for the real Mamma Ida pasta experience you need to make homemade fusilli.  Both this type of  fusilli and Mamma Ida are specialties of the southern region of Basilicata.  They are not the corkscrew shaped things that you find in the supermarket but thin hollow tubes about four inches long.  This is how you make them:

The Mama Ida way is to put some flour on a wooden pasta board, make a well in the center, crack in an egg then stir and knead until the ingredients are throroughly combined.

Then she rolls out a rope of dough, pinches off inch long segments and rolls them out on her fusilli needle.  ONE AT A TIME.  When you consider that a modest Sunday lunch in our house consists of at least twelve people you can understand why the traditional Italian grandmother rarely gets out of the kitchen.  I prefer the renegade American daughter in law approach which is to use any and every electrical powered labor saving device available on this side of the Atlantic.  Unfortunately for me, there is as yet no household appliance that can produce fusilli because (and this is crucial) they must be ROLLED and not EXTRUDED.  Therefore, although I have my choice of two different machines to mix and knead the dough, I still have to roll my pasta with a fusilli needle.  As a result I make fusilli about once a year and cross train diligilently for at least two weeks before the event.

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For this recipe, you’ll need one egg.  I keep mine here.

Pardon me ma’am, I’m just going to reach under your bottom a moment.

You’ll also need about 300 grams of flour.  (Sorry about the metric system but once you’ve crossed over there’s just no going back.)  Use 150 grams of regular white flour and 150 grams of semolina flour.  Mix the two flours together with the egg and just enough warm water (perhaps a quarter of a cup but it varies) to form a smooth ball of dough.  I put the ingredients in my Bimby to mix them all together.

No, this is not the beginning of a dumb blonde joke.  “Bimby” is the name of a legendary food processor here in Italy.  It makes pretty short work of kneading pasta.  Although it looks like a blender, I don’t recommend that you use your blender for this job.  Bimby has an  engine strong enough to grate nails.  Your blender would probably never forgive you if you used it to knead pasta.

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When you have a nice, smooth somewhat elastic ball of pasta, break off a piece and roll it out into a long rope.  Cut the rope into pieces about an inch long.  At this point it’s a lot like playing with play doh.

You can even get your six year old to help. No baby, that’s a pizza…I told you to make a fusilli.  Child labor is so unreliable these days.

Take your fusilli needle (mine is part of a spoke from an old bicycle) and press it into the piece of dough.  Rub up and down until the dough spreads out and becomes wrapped around about four inches of the needle. Pull it off and set it aside.

Try not to squeeze it so that it doesn’t lose it’s nice straw-like shape.  Now repeat about 250 times.  When you’re done, pick up the phone, make reservations at your favorite restaurant, leave the kids with a baby sitter and go out to dinner.  You’ve earned it.

If, on the other hand, you’d rather eat the fruits of your labor, bring a big pot of salted water to boil, toss in the fusilli and cook until al dente.  Drain and toss with your sauce and of course, lots of grated parmesan cheese.

Buon Appetito!

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Tags: fusilli, homemade pasta, pasta