This recipe comes from The Big Book of Pasta. More like 'The Big Book of Bullsh*t'. I looked briefly for an author name, but there was none, which is a clue in itself. If you're unfortunate enough to own a copy, you'll find the offending recipe on p. 310.
Accompanied by: Garlic Bread
Liquor: Ale again. Plenty of.
Difficulty: Hamburger Hill
Having been inspired by Masterchef: The Professionals, I decided I wanted to try home-made pasta this week.
I mentioned this vaguely to my wife, and she selected this recipe while doing the online grocery shopping, to which I made no objection.
The first step in this recipe is to make the fresh pasta dough, because it needs to rest for half an hour before you use it. The book has a handy 'Basic Pasta Dough' recipe on pg. 8, two quantities of which are called for by the tortellini recipe. Since the dough recipe says a single 'quantity' serves 3-4, and the tortellini says it serves 3-4, I glossed over this inconsistency and only made one portion. A good thing too, for more than one reason.
The first reason was this:
Now, you can clearly see what I've done wrong here, can't you? That's right, I've followed the bloody recipe! And I quote: "... make a well in the center with your fingers. Pour the eggs and oil into the well then, using the fingers of one hand, gradually incorporate the flour into the liquid." How is that ever going to work?
Oh well, I guess I should have used a little common sense and mixed it in a bowl the first time, like Cousin It here:
It then says, and here's the key to the whole debacle, 'Roll the pasta dough on a lightly floured surface to a rectangle 2-3mm thick'.
Conservatively, I'd estimate that it should be at least 3-4 times thinner than that!
Ours, however, were fat little biscuits:
The filling, such as it was, was trivial to put together: poached chicken, parmesan and spinach in a food processor with a little seasoning.
We then proceeded to ladle this out onto our squat little dough-turds with merry abandon.
Fittingly, a stormtrooper watched over the carnage as I rolled out another little pebble, oblivious. I also put too much filling in each one, which we'd discover later. That was entirely my fault though, and due to the fact that I'd made too little dough for the recipe. Even after over-filling the tortellini, we still had half the stuffing left.
When we then tried to fold the dough over and seal the pouches, stuffing squirted out, necessitating several rear-guard actions. Another problem was that the dough had gotten a bit dry and crusty around the edges, making manipulation difficult.
In the end, we had a haphazard, but potentially meal-making little cluster of stomach-grenades:
After letting the little bastards dry, sorry, stand for an hour, we boiled them for ten minutes as instructed. The trivial sauce of single cream, garlic and sliced mushrooms was at least edible, possibly even tasty. Although we should have had some chopped parsley to offset the corpse-like pallor of the dish.
Mmmm... You see dodgy pasta. I see the Vietcong.
I've never before had a hangover from dough. I swear the act of digesting this crud gave me a migraine the next day.
The problem was the dough was essentially uncooked. So the tortellini were flavourless, hard nodules of raw, dry dough. Thank goodness we had a garlic bread, which went well with the sauce.
The key error here was, I think, the thickness of the dough, by a factor of four. Also, we should perhaps have rolled out the dough only when just about to use it.
Next time, I shall follow this man's sage advice.
The next day, we made some tasty and warming risotto with the left-over ingredients (we had everything but the sundried tomatoes).
And finally, I managed to feed our Christmas cake. So it wasn't a total loss.
Next week: Something Halloween-related
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