This Italian food has become an Irish staple, but most of us reach for the dried variety. Home-made is far better, Ursula Ferrigno tells Marie-Claire Digby
The only thing standing between most home cooks and a pile of golden, silky strands of home-made tagliatelle is a hulking brute of a pasta machine that requires two pairs of hands to operate and is almost impossible to clean, so gets shoved to the back of a cupboard groaning with other kitchen-gadget impulse buys. How encouraging, then, to learn that Ursula Ferrigno, author of more than a dozen authoritative books on Italian cooking, doesn't believe in them. "I don't like the machines. It always goes wrong. The pasta always goes to one side. I make ravioli, pappardelle and all the different shapes, all by hand. It's really simple. I'm not trying to be superwoman."
Easy for her to say: she's half-Italian, her grandmother taught her how to make fresh pasta when she was a child - "I was her apprentice, but I wasn't allowed to roll it until I was about eight" - and she makes pasta every week.
In truth, making fresh pasta dough is a doddle, but it takes a bit of manual dexterity to cut perfect tagliatelle. Rolling sheets for lasagne or ravioli is quite simple, on the other hand, and very rewarding. And if you're determined to master the machine, Ferrigno includes instructions on using one, as well as cutting shapes by hand, in her book Pasta Passion (a Quadrille reprint of the classic Truly Madly Pasta, £8.99 in UK).
A couple of hours spent learning the secrets of pasta- and bread-making with Ferrigno - who teaches at Cooks Academy in Dublin and Books for Cooks, La Cucina Caldesi and Divertimenti in London - makes both techniques very accessible and unlocks the key to great Italian cooking.
"Critical to everything I cook is freshness and quality, because Italian food is terribly simple food. It is nothing complex, and it doesn't take hours. Of course bread takes a bit of time, pasta takes a bit of time, but the rest of our eating is all achievable in our daily lifestyles, even when we say we have no time," she says.
"Don't switch off and think, how am I ever going to fit pasta-making into my lifestyle? It tastes better than anything you can buy. I make enough for the week, so each day I can have fresh pasta as part of my meal. It actually rolls out very, very easily - as easily as pastry. It just takes two minutes, and it's delicious."
Ferrigno may eat pasta every day, but for an Italian the concept of sitting down, as we do, to a meal of a huge bowl of pasta, with nothing to follow, is totally alien. "Pasta is consumed every single day of an Italian person's life. It's the only thing I know I'm definitely going to do every day - everything else is a muddle. But I know I'll eat pasta every day, just not in vast quantities. I get very annoyed about this," Ferrigno says. "[ A serving of] ravioli is three pieces - depending on the size, of course. If it is tagliatelle it's a small bowl with a delicious sauce, always mixed together. It's also about the sauce and the pasta shape, all about the marriage. But we then move on to another course. Pasta's not our whole meal. If it was our meal it would be too much, and we wouldn't feel well; we'd feel very bloated."
Girth-expanding and tummy-bloating or not, pasta is a staple of the modern Irish diet, and with a little practice we'd all be rolling our own, even occasionally, instead of reaching for packets. "Pasta is the original convenience food because it takes so little time to cook, and, made with the right ingredients, it is very good for us. So make pasta and keep it in the fridge and pull off a bit and roll it out as you need it. But I'd never touch bought pasta . . . supermarket-filled ravioli. They are revolting. It's pasta that's made with very inferior flour. All the ingredients are poor. And they've got a shelf life of 20 days. How can they be real?" Ferrigno, a gentle and enthusiastic teacher, is almost evangelical in her determination to demystify pasta- and bread-making, and she makes the process appear painless. She throws together a pasta dough effortlessly, and you get the impression she could do it with her eyes shut, following the basic premise that you need equal quantities of tipo 00 (double-zero) flour and semolina, with one egg for every 100g of flour and semolina, some salt and olive oil.
"Tipo 00 flour makes a massive difference to anything you have to add flour to, whether it is cakes or sauces, obviously pasta, biscuits or pastry. It's like gossamer, and it never needs to be sifted. It has been milled twice, hence the two zeros, so it's very fine and very light and consequently has a lower gluten content, so the results are much lighter, too," she explains.
Salt is mixed into the flour and semolina, and a well is made in the middle, into which the eggs are broken and whipped up with the oil, before the dry ingredients are drawn in to form a paste. "The eggs should be deliciously fresh, hopefully from hens that have been picking around on grass - I like dirty eggs. Their rich yolks will give a nice flavour to the pasta."
A quick 10-minute knead - "not as vigorous and not as intensive as bread-making; it's a gentle kneading" - a short rest in the fridge, and your fresh pasta is ready to roll. Then the fun starts.
Nobody said it was easy, but working with fresh pasta is definitely a skill that requires practice, and plenty of room to work in. "I have a really nice old butcher's block which I use for rolling out my pasta. You do need quite a bit of space," Ferrigno says.
Like most of us, she has grand designs in mind for her dream kitchen. "I am dying to have a nice kitchen. I'm still working on my husband. I'd like a giant counter, half marble and half wood. Marble is beautifully cool for the pasta, and wood is kind and warm for bread-making. The marble is very nice for chocolate work. When I used to teach in Lucca, I used to look at the Carrara marble mountains in the background. They glisten on a hot day, and I used to think, that's where my work surface is going to come from, one day."
Pasta Passion by Ursula Ferrigno is published by Quadrille, £8.99 in UK; Ursula Ferrigno's Complete Italian Cookery Course is published by Mitchell Beazley, £20 in UK
BASIC EGG PASTA
350g plain four, preferably Italian 00
350g semolina flour
1 tsp sea salt
7 medium eggs, preferably corn-fed so the yolks are yellow
2 tbsp olive oil
Mix the flours together on a work surface, adding the salt, to form a volcano-like pile with a crater-like reservoir in the centre. Break the eggs into the reservoir and add the oil.
With a fork, slowly break up the eggs and draw in the flour with the other hand, to make a paste.
When all the flour is mixed in you should have a ball of dough. If it is too dry add a little more oil or water. If it is too damp knead in more flour. At first the mixture will be soft and claggy, but knead until it is smooth and silky, and when you press a finger into it the depression bounces back.
Wrap in cling film and let it rest in the fridge for a half-hour. This will make dough for 12. It is easier to deal with large quantities. You can keep the dough in the fridge for several days or freeze.
RICOTTA GNOCCHI
300g ricotta cheese
85g Italian 00 flour, plus extra for dusting
1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed
2 large egg yolks
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
a little freshly grated nutmeg
200g cherry tomatoes, halved
2 tsp peperoncino (dried chilli flakes), or to taste
2 tbsp olive oil
handful fresh basil leaves, torn
Parmesan, grated
Mix the first six ingredients together in a bowl. Knead lightly on a floured surface. Roll into a sausage-shaped log the thickness of your little finger.
Cut at an angle to create shapes the length of the first joint of your index finger. Boil the gnocchi in batches in a large pan of boiling salted water. When they rise to the top, skim out into a frying pan.
Add tomatoes, peperoncino and olive oil and saute until the gnocchi are stained with tomato. Serve with torn basil and grated Parmesan.
FERRIGNO'S TIPS FOR ROLLING OUT PASTA
Tacky dough is good dough, so don't add too much flour when rolling out.
Put your body weight behind it when you're rolling it out and the finished pasta will be much silkier and smoother. Through the machine it tends to go off in tangents and be very difficult to handle, but once you're doing it by hand it's just like rolling out pastry, and what you're getting is a much silkier, smoother, more digestible pasta that will be absolutely delicious.
My grandmother hung the pasta over the edge of the table, and the weight of it would stretch it. The pasta should be so thin you can see the colour of your flesh through it. It will expand in contact with hot water, so it must be thin to start.
Leave the finished pasta sheet to dry out a bit before you fold it to make tagliatelle.
You've got to put your passion into it; you've got to love doing it. Then, when you eat it, you'll think, wow!