Rosemary Pasta

OK, so, once again this is a post about a recipe which … well, was rather spontaneous. So there is no recipe in any exact sense (meaning that, aside from the amount of flour, everything is a guess). But … well, this is about as dead simple as you can get.

• 1/2 cup fresh rosemary needles
• 3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 onion
• 1.5 lbs (680 grams) Durum Wheat Semolina
• some strong, all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 Tbsp garlic powder (not garlic salt)
• water

1. Puree rosemary, olive oil, onion, and salt. This should be as fine a puree as you can get, because any little bits left over will give you problems in rolling out your pasta.
2. Add all ingredients to a mixing bowl. Yes, “all” does include the unmeasured quantity of water. I’ll say to just take it slowly, adding water by half-cups until you get something like a workable dough which can be formed into a ball, but which is still quite soft and a bit sticky.
3. Knead dough until you’re happy that everything is distributed evenly.
4. Tuck into a cool corner of the kitchen to rest for an hour or so.
5. Pull it out, knead it with your AP flour until the dough is quite firm. The rest was to be sure that the semolina was fully hydrated – it’s kind of grainy, and coarse, and needs the time to soak up all the water it’s going to.
6. Divide into 8 even pieces.
7. Roll each flat, and feed into your pasta roller, on its widest setting.
8. Fold each piece over in thirds, feed through the roller again, and repeat the folding and feeding but in the other direction, so that each piece will have gone through the roller three times (and gotten a good kneading this way, as well).
9. Decrease the thickness setting of your pasta roller (I go 2 numbers down at this step, but yours may be different – this one’s a Pasta Queen, given to us years ago – thanks L.!)
10. When they come out, cut each piece in half, and hang them somewhere convenient (we use a wooden clothes drying rack) or, if you can’t hang them, dust them lightly with AP flour and be careful not to stack them too high, or they’ll stick.
11. Keep decreasing, cutting the sheets down to size as needed, until you’re down as far as you’re happy with. We don’t go below 3, and even 3 is a bit thin for our liking.
12. Hang them up somewhere to dry. They don’t have to dry all the way, but they must dry somewhat before you can cut them into noodles, or else you’re going to need to use a lot of flour on your board. You could sandwich them in between layers of parchment paper & pop them into the freezer, if you’re going to use them later in lasagna.
13. You’re done!

Our sheets are now almost dry enough to tuck into a zip-top bag for storage. They’ll go into a lasagna in a few weeks or so. We did a single batch of noodles, with the noodle-cutting attachment, just by way of testing to see that everything would taste right. 🙂

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