A recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. I thought it would make a good first pasta course for the Italian dinner I will be cooking (this coming Saturday). It’s supposedly difficult to get the cheese sauce right. Following the instructions in Cook’s Illustrated, it was not.
It’s very simple: Pasta with Pecorino Romano cheese and black pepper.
The pasta is traditionally tonnarelli, which is apparently square, large spaghetti. Surprisingly, the recipe just calls for “thick spaghetti” pasta, rather than a recipe to make it one’s self. I made it myself. One egg’s worth didn’t seem like enough pasta, so I made another egg’s worth (using half and half semolina and 00 pizza dough flour). I just rolled it out and sliced it. I should have used the pasta roller. The size was all over the place.
Since I was making a small batch (1/3 the recipe), I used an immersion blender instead of the food processor to finely grate the cheese and mix it with a small amount of hot water (which is apparently the secret trick – it worked).
I forgot to toast the peppercorns. It turned out fine, anyway.
I think one egg’s worth of pasta will do fine for a single course serving for three.
Made another batch of ciabatta. The bread flour helped tremendously. It was cold, so I let it rise in the oven (the proof setting is 100 F). This left a dried crust after the second-last, hour-long rise. I tried to just put that on the bottom for the last rise, but that broke up the surface of the dough and I did not reform it. There wasn’t much oven rise even with the aluminum foil roasting pan as a cover. Tasty though.
Next time: Plastic wrap on the rising dough, not a tea towel, and ensure the loaves on the final rise have at least a semi-tight surface.
Tomorrow will be bread day, again. Apparently, we like ciabatta since we go through it so quickly. To be fair, this was mostly not-risen ciabatta, so it only makes half-sandwiches. I’m going to try again, so biga, tonight.
The dinner plan is: Ciabatta course (not a big fan of the smoked olive oil, but the Tuscan herb is good), Caesar Salad course (why can’t one buy a single anchovy? what will I do with the rest of them?), Cacio e Pepe course (hence the testing of the sauce technique), a meaty pasta course, and gelato for dessert.
I still haven’t decided on the meaty pasta. I’ll get forced into something soon enough. I have a bunch of ricotta. Perhaps cheese (with spinach?) ravioli with a meat sauce? Perhaps lasagna? I have all the “make a heavy sauce” ingredients. There’s a French name for it that I can’t remember. The carrot, celery, and onion base for all sorts of things. Add a can of those DOP tomatoes (I want to say “Marino”, but that’s a type of wool, and “Marciano” are cherries). For a ravioli sauce, I think running the sauce through my blender then a sieve (my blender is a Walmart special, not Vitamax) would work then add some browned Italian sausage?
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