Mafaldine With Pink Peppercorns & Parmigiano-Reggiano From Missy Robbins
Lilia’s beloved mafaldine with pink peppercorns was a bit of an accident. I was home testing out custom pasta bowls for Lilia and, well, I needed to see what they looked like with pasta in them. All I had in the house was spaghetti, butter, and parmigiano; I threw them together and gave the dish a last-minute dusting of ground pink peppercorns for color. I loved it. Before we opened, we tested the combination with a number of different shapes before settling on mafaldine, a long, ribbon-shaped pasta that’s ruffled at the edges, offering perfect little coves for parmigiano and butter to hide in.
With just four ingredients, it’s stripped down—so stripped down, in fact, that I initially wondered if anyone would order it. (It’s now one of Lilia’s most-ordered pastas.) It turned out to be a powerful argument for quanto basta, and a true teaching pasta: it’s all about balance, attention to detail, and the all-important marriage ceremony.
Photo by Jennifer Livingston
INGREDIENTS
Makes 4-6 servings
567 grams/1 pound 4 ounces extruded mafaldine (recipe below)
114 grams/½ cup unsalted butter, cold and cubed
90 grams/1 cup plus 22 grams/¼ cup finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
8 grams/3 tablespoons coarsely ground pink peppercorns
METHOD
Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. Generously salt the water. Add the mafaldine to the water and cook for 5 to 8 minutes, until al dente. While the pasta is cooking, place a large sauté pan over low heat. Add ladles (230 grams/1 cup) pasta cooking water to the pan. Gradually add half of the butter to the pan and stir to emulsify.
Using tongs or a pasta basket, remove the pasta from the pot and transfer to the sauté pan. Turn up the heat to medium. Toss for 2 minutes to marry the pasta and the sauce. Add the remaining butter and keep tossing the pasta until the butter is absorbed. If the sauce begins to tighten, add a splash of pasta water and continue tossing. The sauce should cling to the pasta but still glide easily in the pan.
Remove from the heat and add 90 grams/1 cup of the Parmigiano and 5 grams/2 tablespoons of the pink peppercorns. Continue tossing until evenly distributed. Divide the pasta into bowls. Garnish with the remaining 22 grams/¼ cup Parmigiano and 3 grams/1 tablespoon pink peppercorns.
Extruded Mafaldine
INGREDIENTS
500 grams semolina flour, plus more for dusting, as needed (preferably Rustichella d’Abruzzo semola rimacinata)
175 grams water, at room temperature
METHOD
Like all pasta dough, extruded pasta dough begins with a ratio. Mine is 25 to 30 percent water to semolina by weight. Most home pasta extruders have a capacity of 500 grams at a time, which will yield about four regular portions of pasta or six smaller portions, once you account for losing about one-quarter to one-third of the batch at the beginning of the process (more on that later), hence the flour and water measurements for this dough. Feel free to use smaller amounts, so long as you keep the ratio intact. From here, pretty much the entire process diverges from the making of fresh pasta.
To begin, attach your preferred die to the machine and open the hopper. Add the full volume of semolina, and then turn the machine to “mix.” While the machine is in motion, gradually add the water about 1 tablespoon or so at a time. Before you add the full amount of water, pause the machine and check the hydration. (I do this once I’ve added three-quarters of the water.) Open the hopper and grab some of the “dough” in your hand. In the mixing chamber, it should appear loose and crumbly, like the top of a coffee cake. When you make a fist with the “dough,” it should bind together and hold the impression of your hand but still easily break up into a crumb-like texture. If it does not bind at all, add a very small amount of water—about 1 tablespoon—keeping in mind that the word dough is deceiving. The mixture should be fairly dry in the mix phase, as it does not actually become a dough until it goes through the die.
Return the machine to mix for 5 minutes. Pause it again and open the hopper to check the texture of the “dough,” scraping down any that is clinging to the sides of the machine. Let the “dough” rest in the machine for 5 minutes. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper and generously dust with semolina. Set it next to the machine.
Switch the machine to “extrude.” As the pasta begins to emerge from the machine, it will appear both rigid and a bit gnarled and untrue to form, no matter what die you’re using. Texture is what you’re looking for on the surface of the pasta, but not so much that the pasta appears as though someone chewed it up and spit it out. This ragged debut is what happens as the machine heats up but hasn’t quite reached the optimal temperature for extrusion, and the dough is not yet binding uniformly. You will inevitably have to discard some of your batch (generally 50 to 100 grams), particularly on your first run. As the machine warms it up, the pasta will begin extruding with greater ease and the surface texture will reveal a delicate ridged pattern—looking almost like a strand of hair under a microscope. Use a bench scraper to cut the pasta, and set it aside on the sheet pan. (If you’re making a long pasta, be sure to pull it out of the machine gently, untangling any strands as they emerge.) When the entirety of the “dough” has been extruded, shut off the machine, sprinkle the pasta on the sheet pan with another layer of semolina, and set aside to dry uncovered at room temperature.
If not using right away, cover the sheet pan with plastic wrap and refrigerate for up to 36 hours.
From Pasta by Missy Robbins. Excerpted by permission of Ten Speed Press.
