Noodles

I've been making pasta for 10 months now. Over that course i have began to understand the seemingly simple processes that overpopulate the kitchen. I'm a firm believer in the fact that you never understand a recipe until you've done it at least a hundred times. With certain things, like pasta, or bread, or stocks, it takes years to truly understand the complexity and fickleness of the final product. With pasta it is always about maintaining the right level of hydration. Too wet and the dough is sticky and unmanageable. Too dry and it is difficult to work through the machine and will crack and dry out before one can cut the desired shape. You begin to understand the climate and the touch of the dough. You understand how to manipulate the dough; how to cook the noodles; and how the noodle should be served.
Pasta is easy. It is flour. It is eggs. It is salt. There is no leavening. There is no elaborate folding. It is basically a dumpling. Flour bound together cooked in water. But when it is done correctly it is so much more than that. It becomes toothesome and durable. Flavorful and uniquely capable of holding sauce. It becomes something other than the flour that it is made from. Yet we still see pasta as the vehicle and the sauce being the real attraction. Fresh pasta needs no sauce. A little browned butter maybe? A little parmeggiano? It's final destination is not to be the carrier for a four hour over-reduced tomato sauce. Let a dried pasta do that. Even a quality dried pasta doesn't require the mounds of spaghetti sauce that most American anoint their noodles with.
It is easy to see these things after being so close to it for so long. Pasta was and is intended to be one with itself. It is it's own realization. It isn't Laurel waiting for it's Hardy. It is it's own act. Were it simply meant to be a straight man for the sauce then the Italians never would have been so particular about its production. They never would have cared about the shape of the noodle, the amount of egg yolks, whether it's dried or fresh. They just would have dropped some sauce on a chunk of old bread. See, pasta dishes are really about the noodle. And that's where we lose sight in our culture. We are so excited about the flavours that will shake the mundane off our palate that we miss the true complexity in food. We are so immersed in our rudimentary tastes of salt, sweet and fat that we miss out on the ability of something so simply to be something so grand. We eagerly go after sausage and pepper laden tomato sauces, or cheese and garlic heavy gelatinous cream sauces to cut through the normal routine of filth we feed ourselves on a daily basis. We want bold flavours. Bold flavours that have muted our ability to taste. Try a little olive oil and chili flake on spaghetti topped with parmesan. Let the pasta speak.