After reading more of Cooking by Hand, I wanted to break from my usual egg pasta and make a semolina based pasta with just flour and water. Time to focus on the most basic pasta, relying only on good flour. Instead of durum wheat (which I don’t have any of), I used closely related emmer and Kamut. Both belong to the Triticum Turgidum species, as opposed to T.Aestivum for general wheat. Durum is the standard-bearer of this older branch of the wheat genus, which originally comes from emmer as its more ancient ancestor. Pictured below you can see the differences between Kamut (left) and emmer (right).

I first milled the Kamut and emmer on the course edge of a fine grind, which I thought would allow me to sift off the bran to produce a medium fine semolina. However, too much was trapped by the 50 mesh sifter. I took the mill down a couple clicks to medium fine. However, passing this flour through the 50 mesh sifter still resulted in a scant 55% extraction, leaving too much of the milled grain behind. Not really sure of what to do, I decided to use only the sifted flour portion to make the pasta. In the end it was’t really semolina, more of a emmer and Kamut flour blend.

After some reading, I think I have a approach that may work to get semolina. I will give it a try next time. Although I think I will try to find some good durum berries.

On to the pasta. First, I blended the sifted emmer flour (180grams) with sifted Kamut flour (60grams) and added only water (~120grams-50% hydration).

With a couple minutes of kneading , the dough came together nicely with a firm texture and spring-back. It may have been just a tad on the too wet side though. More flour was needed to roll it out than normal. (Disclosure: I used King Arthur all-purpose for rolling out flour.) After hand-rolling the dough into long flat sheets, I cut it into flat 1/4 inch ribbons to get what was essentially an egg-less tagliatelle.

The sauce and final product: I browned some ground pork and set it aside. Sauteed finely diced white onion and garlic, added one can of hand crushed (by me) San Marzano tomatos, followed by the tomato juice from the can, some dry herbs, a splash of the red wine I was drinking, and then fresh oregano at the end. Grated parmigiano-reggiano on top.

You can see in the picture that the noodles did not quite hold up. The dough just wasn’t tough enough (combined with leaving them in the boiling water for a tad too long).Still, the pasta was light and fresh, with a mild wheat taste. Distinct from the dry-earth flavor of durum semolina pasta. The quality it evoked was simplicity–that this is a pasta noodle, one that can comfortably hold its own (despite being a little soft) with nothing but a simple tomato sauce.

The baby loved the leftover pasta the next night. She will hopefully learn to appreciate al dente, but right now mushy is good. (It is hard to get a good picture of a baby eating.) The wife and I re-purposed the sauce for a quick rigatoni using store bought dry noodles. She said my pasta was better.