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by jakewins 868 days ago
IMO it does not, but maybe I’m just making it wrong.. It’s notable that places like French Laundry explicitly dry their home made pasta before cooking with it, IMO the al-dente texture is way better in dried pasta than freshly made.

I guess it’s subjective ofc, but making pasta is a whole thing, hours of work, massive mess to clean up, for an end result that has worse texture than a high end dried pasta

5 comments

French cooking YouTuber, Alex, has a series [1] where he goes deep on this topic. If anyone is interested in the intricacies of why high end dried pasta is so special and hard to replicate, I'd highly recommend checking his series out.

1. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLURsDaOr8hWXz_CFEfPH2wFhI...

Italian nonnas can make pasta in 10 minutes:

https://www.pastagrannies.com/

Like if you're going by French Laundry standards then that's a different ball game.

The chefs at French Laundry would probably tell you they'd rather eat at the Italian Nonna's.
>hours of work

Everything takes a long time when you have no experience. Once you have a recipe and process, making pasta is actually pretty easy. Not something you're going to do after a long day of work, necessarily, but certainly not hours of work.

hours of work, massive mess to clean up

I don't know how you're making pasta, but it it doesn't have take this long, and there's certainly not a lot of mess (one bowl and one surface the size of a cutting board to clean)...

If you've got a cookbook and you're trying to make fiddly shapes or pasta in quantities like they do in fancy restaurants like French Laundry, OK, I can see how that may take hours, and maybe that's the problem, but if you're just making orecchiette or cavatelli for your family, it's not going to take long at all.

You’re probably not kneading enough. Or not resting long enough at the end. Recipes I’ve seen from Thomas Keller don’t involve dying but I’ve not seen them all I’m sure.

It doesn’t take hours of active time, just 15 minutes, and even if you don’t rest it at the end it should still be better than store bought.

I like it too, but there's no denying that it's more of a production than you're suggesting. You need a clean place to knead the dough (so first clean the counter), you need to flour the dough as you're kneading and then putting it through the KitchenAid rollers so flour gets on the counter and floor, you need a cutting board to cut the pasta if you're not using the machine cutters (which I agree are superfluous), you need a tray on which to put the cut pasta after cutting and before cooking.

Then you need to clean up the mixer, pasta rollers, counter, floor, cutting board, knife and resting tray. Maybe you can minimize all this by the generous use of plastic wrap or something, but 15 minutes would be a reach goal for me.

I like to cook a lot so my counter is already clean, but I've got a silicone mat that goes in the dishwasher I use for pie crusts and pasta. Everything else goes in the dishwasher. I do the mixing in a bowl. I sweep after every time I cook anyway, but I rarely end up with much flour on the floor.

I've worked in food service off and on for 30 years now (got my first job when I was in 13, was a meat cutter at 20, now own catering and packaged food companies) so my kitchen habits are probably not that of the average person.

> you need to flour the dough as you're kneading and then putting it through the KitchenAid rollers so flour gets on the counter and floor,

I found out that using semolina can almost negate the usage of additional flour on the counter, the roller and on the cut pasta (I still put some because I think it adds a little bit of texture to the dough). I have a ratio of 1 part semolina to 2 parts of regular flour, and 1 egg per 100g dry ingredients. Cleaning up afterwards is just a super quick sweep with the broom and dustpan.

a clean work surface in a kitchen?! talk about bourgie living