[Sca-cooks] Redaction done this weekend
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Mon Apr 18 07:21:58 PDT 2005
Also sprach nickiandme at att.net:
>I made two versions of ravoli dough. One was unbleached flour - It
>worked fairly smooth, easy to handle, roll out, sealed extremely
>well. The other version I used semolina flour mixed with a bit of
>the unbleached flour (I ended up adding 2 tables of unbleached flour
>to the semolina flour).
>
>The recipe I ended up with was 2 & 1/2 cups flour, 1 egg and 1 egg
>white. I cut in four tablespoons of butter and a 1/2 teaspoon of
>salt (next time I will increase the salt to the full teaspoon called
>for in the recipe.) I also added a tablespoon of water to the
>semolina batch, but only a half tablespoon to the unbleached batch.
>
>The semolina batch - was much fussier to work with when trying to
>make the ravoli. It tore easily, and just didn't want to seal
>tightly.
>
>When cooked both batches pretty much looked alike. But the semolina
>batch was slightly toothier to eat. I liked it better. I don't
>know if this because this is how I expect the ravoli noodle to taste
>or what. It wasn't chef-boy-r-dee tender.
My experience has been that semolina pasta doughs benefit from a rest
overnight in the fridge. It's as if you can make a dough and moisten
the granules of meal and get them to stick together in what feels
like a cohesive pasta dough, and sort of behaves like one, but isn't
quite one until the individual granules have time to soften in the
presence of liquid. When cooked, the un-"cured" dough seems to be
kind of coarse and soggy. I won't go any deeper into the science of
it right now; it's just been my observation.
If you knead the dough until it's as smooth and elastic as you can
get, then wrap it up and refrigerate it for a few hours or overnight,
then knead and roll it out again, it seems to behave more like what
we expect from a fine pasta dough.
Adamantius
--
"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils mangent de la
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them
eat cake!"
-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782
"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry
Holt, 07/29/04
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