Noodles can be scary. OK, not the kind you buy in a box and douse withbolognese. But the fresh kind? The kind made from dough you knead, run through a pasta machine, and shape by hand? That kind's best left to chefs, right?
After all, chefs like Anita Lo know how to handle their noodles. If there’s a signature dish at her New York restaurant,Anissa, it’s a handmade, paper-thin soup dumpling wrapper filled with molten foie gras. But on a visit to the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy last fall, she got back to pasta basics. As she watched local chefs mix and knead supple pasta dough—then form simple shapes without the need for a bulky pasta machine, she reconnected to fresh pasta's handmade roots.
“It’s always freeing to remember how simple good cooking can be,” said Lo as she stood behind a marble table in her New York City apartment working the pliant dough, enriched with eggs and a drop of olive oil. Instead of paper-thin sheets of pasta and fancy fillings, she learned to make unfussy, hand-shaped orecchiette that you don't even need a rolling pin to make. She even swapped out fancy, long-simmering bolognese for an equally seductive, but way faster sauce that packs just as much meaty depth. Here's how to make the uber-easy pasta that Lo fell in love with:
With just a few simple ingredients, a clear workspace, and 10 minutes of kneading, you can create a versatile pasta dough with tenderness and bite. Lo's recipe errs on the side of a less sticky dough, making it even easier to handle and less likely to stick to your work surface. Pro tip: the longer you let the pasta rest in the fridge, the more cooperative it will be for shaping, since the R&R allows the gluten in the dough to relax.
Sure, a pasta machine yields super-thin dough, but there’s something elemental (and surprisingly easy) about shaping it by hand, and the finished product has a delicious chewy bite that stands up to heartier sauceslike this one. Here, Lo rolls the dough into a long log, slices it into thimble-sized pieces, and then pokes them with her fingers to form seriously cute, double-cratered orecchiette, or "little ears," that are chewier and more tender than the kind you find in American stores. Bonus: Those double indentations are perfect for cradling a simple, flavorful sauce. It'll take time to slice and poke all that pasta, but there's zero stress involved.
Those double indentations in Lo's orecchiette are perfect for cradling a simple, flavorful sauce, so Lo skipped the long-simmered bolognese in favor of another signature Emilia-Romagna ingredient,Mortadella. “Mortadella is so easy to find, and yet it adds so much depth and plays really well with the pasta,” said Lo. “You end up with a super flavorful sauce without a long-cooking procedure.” Plenty of springy peas, fresh mint, and lemon zest are just one more reminder that fast and fresh can be just as delicious as slow and rich.
