As the weather turns, hearty fresh pasta starts to sounds good again. These changes in my sentiments (culinary and otherwise) remind me how close we are to the patterns of the planet and our particular place on it, despite our constructive attempts at distance. Fresh pasta, like bread, is simple in idea, yet varies incredibly on fine differences of texture, water content, and the quality of your ingredients. I have never been satisfied with the fresh pasta I have made. At its worst, it tasted like boiled card stock. At its best, it tasted like fresh pasta.

In all the months I have been playing around with my fresh-milled flour, fresh pasta had not occurred to me as a good use. I blame the weather for this oversight. Looking at the last few Kamut berries sitting around, I thought that rather than bread, this stuff was better for a durum fresh egg pasta.

I decided not to use all Kamut flour, and blended it 50/50 with some Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose. It always feels a little like cheating when I pull out my commercial flour, but I wanted to really see what the Kamut flour would do to my regular recipe. (Not so much a recipe, really just following a standard process and mixing and kneading until it feels right.)

Here is my dough ball. It kind of refused to get nice and smooth, but the feel was right.

After relaxing the dough, I rolled it out by hand.  (At the end of last winter, I tossed my old cheap roller machine, swearing I would get a fancy new one. Still looking.) The dough held up beautifully, with little sticking or tearing.

Cut into pappardelle and tied into knots to dry. I ended up refrigerating it overnight, as my wife and I went out. 

Final product for eating: A simple ground pork ragu, with fennel, mushrooms, and a little tomato. The pasta was great. For the first time, I can say that my pasta had tooth and flavor. You could have eaten it with almost nothing on it, like true good pasta. The part still lacking is the quality of the eggs. I need to find somebody raising chickens that hatch eggs with deep yellow-orange yolks, rather than these pale yellow heartless blobs (and these are pricey free-range eggs). Looking at the yolks in David Lebovitz’s photos makes me think America has a chicken egg problem.

Kamut flour has earned my respect back. Time to go buy some more berries and hunker down for a long, damp Seattle winter.