When I was a teenager all I wanted to eat was pasta. My mom got so sick of my brother and I always wanting pasta that she threatened to make pasta and nothing else until we broke down and begged for anything else. Nonstop pasta lasted about two weeks, until my mom couldn’t take it anymore. To this day, when I go back home to visit she doesn’t even have to ask what I want for dinner when I get there (it’s baked ziti or nothing).

And now that I have some new durum to experiment with, my own pasta streak will continue for the foreseeable future. I think the next will be cavatelli, a classic homemade semolina pasta. For this first durum test, however, I wanted to see if I could make a semolina flat noodle. Results were mixed.

Compared to Kamut, durum berries have a similar color, but are considerably smaller. Durum is picture below on the left, with Kamut on the right. I milled the durum using the my same three step semolina process, with 600 grams of durum resulting in:

• 125 grams of durum flour (passed through the #80 mesh)
• 195 grams of fine semolina
• 285 grams of coarse semolina (with some bran removed)

For the dough, I used the most basic recipe:

• 280 grams of semolina (which included 190g of fine semolina, 10g of durum flour and 70g of the coarse semolina).
• 140 grams of water.

The dough was mixed and well-kneaded into a firm smooth ball, then left to rest for 1 1/2 hours before rolling into flat sheets. I rolled the dough to the third narrowest setting on the rolling machine.

 

I was more interested in testing out the durum semolina than the actual final pasta dish, so the noodle cutting was sort of a random crinkle-cut wide flat noodle. The noodles were good although somewhat non-distinct in flavor. Kamut definitely has a more pronounced hearty butternut type essence. This durum was more a plain light flavor. The noodles had a firm texture, but didn’t hold up as a long noodle. I am not entirely sure what the issue was. My wife thought they were better than I did, so they had that going for them.