[Sca-cooks] Redaction done this weekend

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

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