Because of the quarantine, my girlfriend and I haven't seen each other in about two months, which is unacceptable. But also because of the quarantine, I've been watching a lot of Binging with Babish on YouTube, which is slightly more acceptable.
While binging Babish I was watching a video in which he made his own pasta along with recipes to follow, and this sprung an idea in my head: What my girlfriend and I made pasta together?
Well considering that neither I nor my girlfriend is master chefs, my expectations weren't set very high.
Nevertheless, we both agreed to at least try. I won't give a step by step analysis because no one wants to hear an inexperienced pasta maker explain how to make pasta. If you are still interested in how the link to Pasta | Basics with Babish will be right here.
At first, I was very scared, mostly because the mound of flour I had to surround the eggs was starting to crumble and the egg was leaking out. I was getting worried and I really wanted to give up because I thought I looked like an idiot, but my girlfriend insisted we follow through (thanks Kaylee you're the best <3).
The more I combined the flour/egg mixture, the more it started to look like actual dough, and this got me more than excited to continue.
After finishing forming the dough and letting it rest it was time to get it ready to turn into noodles. Now I don't own a pasta cutter, but I was totally fine with letting the noodles be a little bit thick. After cutting and liberally flouring our newly formed pasta noodles, we had nothing left to do besides make our dish: Pasta Aglio E Olio. I have no clue what that means but it sounded fancy so I was all in.
After making our very own pasta it was time to reflect: What did I do right? What did I do wrong? Should I do it again? I firmly believe if I was to grade my own pasta, I would give it a C-, it was manageable but not as good as store-bought and definitely nowhere close to a chef's.
I believe where I messed up was forming the dough and laminating the dough.
See, when I started forming the dough I only used two eggs, but the more I started to form the dough, the drier it got. To fix this, I tried adding water to attract more flour to build the dough up.
While this did help, I fear it almost diluted the flavor of my dough, making it more flour than the egg. The other part, the laminating, was pretty much a lack of patience on my part. The dough was thicker than I had hoped for, and that was mostly because I forgot to cut my dough in half before trying to laminate.
This in turn also made it very difficult to roll out and form into pasta noodles.
All in all, I was happy I tried something new, I went out of my comfort zone, and because of a more versatile person because of it. I most likely will try to improve my pasta skills somewhere down the line, but not in front of my girlfriend because I can't have her seeing me look that stupid twice in a row.
