A free copy of a cookbook by the editors of something called “Cook’s Illustrated” recently fell into my hands. According to them, informal taste tests showed no distinction between dried and fresh pasta. But I don’t know what standing these guys have in the culinary community.
“Cooks Illustrated” are the same people who do "America’s Test Kitchen on PBS. They take a very methodical approach to cooking. If you like to know why you have to prepare/cook things this way, or why you need to use these ingredients, mixing order, method, temperature, etc., they’re the people to ask.
Exactly. It’s like asking what’s better, steak or ice cream. They are hardly interchangeable, despite what Jack Kimbal says.
And aruvqan, that post is hardly a recipe, now is it? Come on, make with the measuring spoons and give me something I can follow!
I find dry i just as good as fresh. I actually prfer a harder pasta (al dente), so dry is best for me.
Basic pasta recipe, you can get it anywhere … get an atlas pasta mill, or any other brand of pasta rolling machine, as it really makes it easier.
Roll out your pasta, and do as many reps as the recipe calls for. On the last run through the mill, take the sheet you have and lay it flat gently. Take whole herb leaves, thyme, basil, parsley. Arrange them on half the sheet and then fold it in half and run it through the machine one final time. You get a long sheet of pasta with the herbs decoratively embedded in it. Get ready the ravioli placques.
Probably the fastest soft cheese that would be convenient for the average person to make would be from real fresh unflavored yoghurt
Take your cheese, about 2 cups, about 2 cups of fresh chopped blanched spinach with all the water pressed out, 1 eighth tsp nutmeg, same black pepper, same salt, and a few tablespoons of pine nuts and mux gently until it is all combined.
Lay a sheet of pasta into the mold side of the ravioli placque, put a tsp of teh glop into the impression made in the sheet of pasta by pressing the other part of the placque per directions. Get a small cup of water, and do the wettening of the pasta around the dollop of cheese. Lay the other sheet of pasta on, and use the other side of the placque to press the raviolis together. Just follow the directions that come with the placque, m’kay?
Poach the raviolis per normal in lightly salted water.
Make a basic bechamel sauce and get several ounces of the best parmesan you can afford. The best has these great little crunchy crystals that explode in flavor. Grate it about 1 tbsp per cup of bechamel. Hold that thought=)
Get fresh blue crab and steam it without any seasoning in the water. Any crap like Old bay or Chesapeake will totally fuck the recipe. Therefore, dont look on this as a way to use up steamed blue crab that was cooked this way.
With the hot bechamel at the ready, and one tbsp of cheese and about the same of crab shreds per cup of sauce, and about 1 scant tsp oloroso type sherry per cup of bechamel, gently combine and top the ravioli with the sauce, and you can garnish with a chiffonade of fresh basil but that can get overwhelmingly BASILY
One thing my roomie has never learned is that a lot of different cuisines are not into slamming you with a single flavor like BASIL or PEPPER but looking for a balance of flavors …
sorry for being sort of vague, I am still perfecting this and havent gotten it codified yet=) sort of like my bay scallops in artichoke base recipe…
Fresh is good when it’s ravioli. When I want lobster ravioli, I want the pasta to be slightly chewy, to work with the texture of the lobster and filling, just as I’d want the slightly chewy texture to work with a regular ravioli.
But fresh pasta just tastes gummy under the weight of the rich sauces and tons of veggies I like to accompany my at-home pasta. I prefer the firmer texture of high quality (I like Whole Foods 365 brand) dry pasta.
This. I think most of us automatically think fresh = best, but they are pretty much two different types of food with different functions. I love fresh pasta with delicate sauces and fillings, but it would pretty much drown in a thick homemade tomato sauce.
They are also food snobs in a big way and the editor is batshit insane, but that’s just my opinion. I have gotten some really good recipes from their publication (I no longer subscribe due to the editor’s weirdness–no details, as this was at least 2 years ago, but I don’t buy his Almanzo Wilder routine).
Fresh pasta is delicious, as is dried pasta–a lot depends on what you are making and what sauce goes with it etc. I like 'em both. I’ll be over for dinner at 7. 
Yes you can, actually. The trick is to stop boiling the pasta before it’s completely cooked (at which point you cannot go back of course), put it in a big strainer and “shock” it with cold water while tossing it with your hands to stop it from cooking any further. It is now al dente.
At the fresh pasta restaurant I worked at in the 1990’s, we used this trick all the time, and we had all kinds of fresh pasta. After you shock the pasta, it can be stored but you need to put a little oil into it and toss it again so it doesn’t all stick together. Now you can refrigerate it and use it later, up to maybe a handful of days.
When you want to heat it back up, you “flash” it in boiling water very briefly to heat it up, and wala…fresh pasta al dente.
Not to speak for ouryL, but how does this make the fresh pasta, which is naturally soft, into something chewy?
I guess it depends on what you consider al dente. When I used to preboil fresh homemade lasagna sheets (I don’t bother to preboil anymore) for a minute or two, the pasta “tightens up” for a lack of better description and achieves a texture quite similar to al dente dry pasta, but a little less firm. Basically, you want to cook it to a point where it loses its flour taste, but not until it becomes completely mushy.
As for the OP, as has been said by numerous posters, they’re two different foods, neither is inherently better than the other (although I prefer the texture of fresh pasta.)
I’d bet good money that the pasta taste test ended with a line like, “Of course, both fresh and dried pasta are improved with a half-cup of maple syrup.” Bastards put maple syrup in everything.
Because it still retains a chewy center/texture. You have to be quick…it doesn’t take long for fresh pasta (which should be lain in stacks/sheets with wax paper and rubbed with flour to keep it drier, BTW) to be boiled into a mushy mess.
But you can certainly take fresh pasta, boil it briefly, shock it with cold water and re-heat it at a later time and it will still be al dente.
Generally, I find it better. But it depends on the pastas.
Fresh pasta is for tourists.
IMHO it is worth the fairly minimal effort to make it, provided you have a pasta roller. I never did master the rolling pin.
LOL. Yeah, he is out there, isn’t he?
I still subscribe because I’ve rarely found a Cook’s Illustrated recipe that doesn’t work the first time through, but you do have to just skip anything Christopher Kimball writes. He’s incredibly smarmy.
The recipes are well-researched and they give good background information. That said, they tend to under-spice things, and sometimes make things overly complicated (case in point: recipe for “roasted” chicken made in a skillet. Worked fine, but was about ten times more complex than just roasting a chicken. I’m not sure why anyone would opt for the stovetop method when you can literally just throw a chicken in the oven, shut the door and forget about it for 45 minutes and get more or less the same result.)
I’ve become more enthralled with Mark Bittman lately. High quality, easy recipes, and not a bit of smarm in him.
(drooooollll ) I’m going to make a version of. this for Mother’s Day!..I’ve had fresh angel hair pasta with fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil. It went down WAY too easily, IMO. I once watched Jamie Oliver whip up a batch of noodles on TV, he rolled them out with a rolling pin. So I tried, and BOY HOWDY, was that hard to do! You really need a pasta machine for that, The noodles were good, but too thick for my taste, I think it’s useful to have a pasta recipe in case for some reason you need it and can’t get to a store. (same with flour tortillas, easy to make and very tasty.)
I find it a mess to make. But to me, it’s much, much, much better. Because of this thread, I’ll probably make some this weekend.
Eh… I’d say, a little more to the left.