A Penne for Your Thoughts

W hen the pasta-making urge strikes, you must answer.

My pasta-making urge came from an Instagram video posted by Betül Tunç, better known to her followers as Turkuaz Kitchen and appreciated for her mouth-watering food prep reels. The one that caught my eye was a laminated pasta dough filled with edible flowers. It looked so pleasing that I decided then and there to host a pasta-making party, just for an excuse to try something similar.

While I have helped make fresh pasta before, it had been quite some time. A few years ago, when (for a wide variety of reasons) we were all living at my parents’ again, Sibling No. 3 was experimenting with colored pasta (he was dying it with squid ink) and he helped me make spaghetti (sans squid ink) for my flight instructor.

During this sibling’s college career, he became known as a kind of pasta king around campus. Sunday nights would find him sitting at a reception desk for his job as a resident assistant and cranking away at our grandma’s old pasta machine, churning out mountains of spaghetti noodles. If you checked the next day, you could find the strands drying all over his room, hanging from every space imaginable and waiting for him to bag them up. Not only could he make pasta from scratch, he could cook with it quite well, too. He and I still go back and forth about the best sauce recipes and debate the merits of various cheeses.

It was this sibling who first showed me how to use a pasta machine. There is something intensely satisfying about flouring the dough just right, carefully feeding it through the rollers, and watching it slowly transform into a delicate sheet. When the ill-fated JoAnn Fabrics was going out of business, I happened to be in the store, satisfying my yarn-buying addiction, when I spotted a similar pasta machine languishing on a bottom shelf. Would a heavily discounted tool actually work? I had no idea, but I was willing to try.

Fast-forward to this past weekend, and I found myself standing in front of said pasta machine, slowly realizing that, due to some overenthusiastic dough-making, I had hours’ worth of rolling and shaping looming before me.

It was a lovely party, regardless, with four of us bustling around my apartment’s kitchen and filling up every available space with pots, pieces of pasta, and mounds of cheese. Thanks to my local library, I’d snagged a copy of Fresh Pasta at Home from America’s Test Kitchen, and this sat propped in a place of honor as we consulted it endlessly for dough measurements, filling amounts, and shaped pasta directions.

Being cursed with a spirit of overambition when it comes to food, I set out to make both shaped and filled pasta, while my more sober-minded friends opted for one type and stuck with it. We managed to make three cheese-and-cream-heavy sauces, with little regard for the endless variety of tomato-y options, but it all tasted fantastic. Iteration one was from my roommate, with her version of orecchiette and a delicious alfredo sauce. Take two was cacio e pepe, courtesy of my friend Talia and her boyfriend Theo. My offering, alas, looked like shriveled brains. I’d attempted agnolotti, a filled pasta originating in the Piedmont region of Italy, and I accidentally piped in double the amount of filling I should have. This resulted in strange ravioli-esque shapes that I then overcooked, out of fear that the filling would be raw. But, with a little butter and cheese, they still tasted fabulous, despite their lack in the looks department.

After saying goodbye to Talia and Theo, my roommate and I sped through the dishwashing ritual, and I headed back to the pasta machine, determined to crank out (literally) some shaped pasta before the night ended. The agnolotti pasta was made with an egg dough, but for my garganelli (a seemingly lesser-known cousin of penne) and farfalle attempts, I’d made a tomato-paste-dyed semolina dough. I finagled farfalle out of half the dough sheets, garganelli out of the other half, and set them to dry on cooling racks in the living room. By this point, my feet hurt so badly I could barely stand up, having been going nonstop for hours. I collapsed into bed and looked forward to my Sunday respite.

Monday rolled around, and it bugged me that I hadn’t gotten the filled pasta right. I had more filling, and I did still want to try the laminated pasta, so I grabbed another eight eggs and reanchored the pasta machine on my counter. Forty minutes later, I was rolling out lovely golden sheets and then letting them set for a bit on the counter. This brief air-drying time makes them easier to handle when shaping or filling. I picked and washed sage leaves from my indoor plant (since edible flowers look pretty but are difficult to find locally), and the laminated dough turned out beautifully. I probably could’ve cut the sheets into thinner strips, but I like the tagliatelle-ish vibe.

Then on to the filled dough. This time, I piped the right amount in and sealed it correctly, making for adorable little pasta pockets. While the filling (flavored with, among other things, garlic, mustard powder, and lemon zest) didn’t exactly pair with the vodka sauce I’d prepared, the tomato-based sauce was a lovely change from all the heavy cream of Saturday’s festivities.

On the menu the rest of the week? Who knows! I might have garganelli with peas and prosciutto, or farfalle with lemon and butter, or sage-infused tagliatelle with brown butter sauce. The sky is the limit when you have semolina, warm water, and an hour or two to spare.

Fresh pasta is a few short steps away. Embrace the challenge.