Things wot I Made Then Ate: Fettucini in cream with bacon

A pasta dough is prepared. Obviously this step can be skipped.

Bacon is fried, the fat drained, diced onion and spinach added with cream. Nutmeg grated in.

A hard cheese is grated to top, Parmisiano, Romano, or Grana Padano, whatever you like but this is what I thought of.

The dough is prepared from:

* 1/2 cup AP flour.

* 1/2 cup semolina flour.

* One large egg, that's what it says, but don't believe it, the egg was ordinary size.

* 1/2 egg shell filled with water as a cup.

The dough is loaded with chile pepper flakes, dry mixed Italian seasoning, salt and pepper. This is transgressive to pasta purity, but today I wanted the pasta itself to be flavorful and not just the sauce that covered it. It takes only a minute or two for the dough to come together and to work it sufficiently to develop its gluten and its structure, but it then must relax to evenly distribute the hydration on the molecular level, and to autolyse, the process started by moisture, enzymes release from within the flour break down the structure of the milled grain. That is, when wet, wheat begins to enzymatically digest itself. Resting makes the dough much easier to work and it tends not to shrink back so much when stretched and rolled out.

So the dough is started first but then rolled out, cut, and boiled last. During the dough-resting period, everything else is prepared. So the actual sequence is shown here out of order but in a way that makes sense for each separate part.

The dough is rolled out rather thickly for a rustic fettucini. The Atlas could be hooked up it wasn't.

The dough is heavily floured before folding so that the individual noodles will unroll after being cut. If the cuts are not perpendicular to the folds then each noodle will be zig-zagged, not actually a disaster but indicative of careless cutting.

This ↑ is why pasta tends to boil over when not tended. The surface starch that coats each pasta strand sloughs off in the water imparting structure and strength to each individual bubble so that they can pile up and spill over.

The starch from the pasta also makes the pasta water perfect for thinning down sauces that begin to burn or become too dry and conveniently it has this starch in it so it is self-thickening. Thinning down and thickening up at the same time, as it goes, the perfect viscosity sauce occurs at the point where those two things converge. So there is a bit of playing back and forth with that, simmering down and thickening, thinning with pasta water to halt burn or to correct dryness, but thinning with liquid that carries its own thickener so in the next minute as it condenses and approaches burning it is thicker and saucier than before it had the starch that was in the pasta water used for thinning.