Making Fresh Pasta

1. Making Fresh Pasta Year 10 Food Technology

2. Lesson Objective • Tasks • Prepare yourselves to work – wash your hands, take off jewellery, take off outside coats, remove nail varnish and tie back hair (if appropriate). • Now follow the next few slides To make a batch of fresh pasta ready to turn into a pasta main meal Success Criteria To plan and organise your work space To use the recipe method cards To produce a batch of high quality pasta using authentic ingredients To work in a hygienic and safe way throughout the practical lesson

3. Tasks • For the recipe, let's keep things simple and make enough to construct a good sized lasagne for four people. You will need: • Two large eggs as fresh as possible • Around 120 g of unbleached flour • Place the flour on a clean kitchen surface and make a well in the centre using your fingers. • Break the eggs into this well and from the outside in begin folding the flour into the eggs, using your fingers to break and evenly distribute the yolk and white. Alternatively you could whisk the eggs lightly before adding to the flour. • Bind the mixture together until it becomes a single mass. If the mixture continues to feel a little wet, add a touch more flour. • Then knead it - pulling, stretching and pushing down with the heel of your hand - until the ball of dough is silky smooth to the touch. • Wrap it in cling film and put in the fridge for 15 minutes. • Clean the kitchen surface, flour it again and using a roller, also lightly floured, begin flattening out the dough until it is very thin. If the area you are working on is very tight, split the dough into two. • Then simply cut out the dough into rectangular pieces and you are ready to construct your lasagne.

4. About fresh pasta • Fresh could be said to be more desirable in that it is made with eggs rather than water, and provides a different experience in terms of texture in the mouth, but it is designed for and only works with certain dishes. • For example, that aforementioned softer texture may be fine with a richer meat ragu, but it lacks that certain bite, known to the Italians as al dente, that makes the dried variety a better complement to sauces with less fat content.

5. AfL • How well did you cope during the making stages of the pasta, did you need any help from the teacher? • Did you produce a batch of high quality pasta suitable for the correct dish? • Did you clean up and wash everything in an independent way • Did you need to follow my task list, or did you remember how to make the recipe from the demonstration I showed you?

6. Conchigliette Spaghetti Fusilli Shaped pastas such as fusilli (twists) and conchiglle (shells) go well with all sort of sauces, but especially those with texture (lumps!). If you think about it those lumps of meat, vegetable, or bean are going to get caught up in the crevices and twists. (Which is a GOOD thing!) Short, tubular pastaslike rigatoni, penne or cavatappi go well with sauces that are thick or chunky. Keep the size of the ingredients in mind: tiny macaroni won't hold a chickpea, while rigatoni may feel too large for a simple tomato sauce, where penne would work better. Ridged pastas provide even more texture for sauces to cling to. Cavatappi Penne