Liquid cream ↑.
Solid cream ↓. Delightfully, it tastes like lemon.
This is delicious but ultimately it is fail.
My goal was to use the noodles as vehicle for lox instead of bagel or artisan bread. The whole idea was to use the lox.
But when the time came to eat it I was no longer hungry and I was tired from futzing around with making the noodles. My machine is acting up. The thickness-dial keeps slipping and my work surface was crowded with extraneous things. My neck hurt again. I could have gone without eating and in that critical moment where it all comes together at the end I was looking for peas in a crowded freezer, scrounging for vegetative things to add, clearing out the refrigerator of things that became too old, tossing out things like mad, clearing out the whole thing, I completely spaced out the lox.
I did not add the usual things to poke out the flavor profile. I'm out of black pepper and I forgot to buy it the last two trips to the grocery, no mustard, no herbs. Just basil that became too wet to use. But I used it anyway and threw out the entire package and it was a large package too. I could have planted them in the Aerogarden had I got to them sooner. But I didn't.
The tomatoes too beautiful to ignore are now all wrinkly.
The frozen vegetables at the bottom of the pile in the freezer. And I was too tired to unstack it all and put it all back.
The fresh vegetables in the refrigerator are all thrown out.
The tinned vegetables are the wrong kinds.
The cooked pasta has a beaten egg in it, so two eggs, one egg in the pasta and a second egg in the sauce. The second egg is cooked by the heat of the pasta along with the homemade sour cream.
The basil and salt and nutmeg are meager. It's like hospital food.
But I loved it.
I really do love making my own noodles. There just isn't anything like it.
Here's what you do:
Take and egg and crack it into a bowl.
Now you have two egg shell cups.
Use the larger egg shell cup and fill it with water. Add the water to the egg and whisk them together.
Blend in semolina flour, estimating from 20% to 50%.
Blend in A/P flour or bread flour in increments until you get a very stiff dough.
Stiff dough. Very stiff. The commercial noodle makers dough is nearly totally dry.
Knead the dough ball for a few minutes.
Let it sit there under the overturned bowl.
Say, twenty minutes.
Mine stayed for about 45 minutes. Because I was tired.
This time allows an enzyme in the flour to begin breaking it down. That translates to a softer dough ball.
Cut the dough ball in two and flatten them out.
Roll them to the desired thickness.
This is advanced greatly by using a machine made for this. But that is not necessary. Hand-rolled and hand-cut pasta is fantastic and not much trouble at all. They're usually a good deal thicker. And obviously cut with less precision. People have been doing this for centuries.
The pasta cooks in seconds. It is not possible to have them al dente.
Unless you dry them to hardness first and that takes a few days.
When you dry them quickly, such is possible in Denver, or by using an oven, they tend to break.
Commercially, the Americans probably have some way to do this quickly while the Italians move the pasta through rooms with decreasing degrees of moisture.
I still have the lox and I still need to use it some way. I'm thinking of eggs. And I can always make bread.
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