Pasta - A Case for the Handmade
This post is in support of the LES Ecology Center 2024 Food Justice Summer Cohort, who so graciously learned how to make these cute little pasta shapes with me in August 2024. Many thanks to Chefs for Impact for connecting us all and making food education accessible in New York City.
Handmade Pasta with Tomato Sauce
The first time I smashed a tiny pillow of glutenous dough across the tines of a fork, I felt silly and overjoyed and wondered what the hell I had signed up for.
I was, in fact, making pasta from scratch with my own two hands. I felt like I had found a cheat code or a secret password that unlocked the hidden world behind one of the most ubiquitous (and misunderstood) foods known to the Western world – the noodle. How could it be just flour and water and take less than thirty minutes to pull together? Though a little laborious, the process hardly feels like a chore - especially when you bite into the resulting tender curls of dough. Malloreddus are ribbed, lima-bean-sized pasta shapes from Sardegna (Sardinia). They’re called gnocchetti sardi in other parts of Italy (which literally means Sardinian gnocchi). They look a bit like what many Americans know as ‘shells’ (often followed by “and cheese” and pictured on a bright blue, dust-covered box on a supermarket shelf or someone’s pantry in Anytown, USA). But these little wonders have been loosely formed by hand for generations in Italy and wouldn’t be caught dead in a box.
“In traditional cultures the entire life world is the product of human hands […] a continuous meeting and joining of the hands of successive generations.”
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand. John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
Pushing my fingers into the soft mass of dough as it came together felt like touching the hands of my Italian ancestors – wondering if my mother’s Sicilian family would have made anything like this perhaps three or four generations ago. After a few trial runs, I felt fairly confident I could at least feed my friends. I demonstrated, they followed, everyone ate and drank - we called it a party. At this point, buying and preparing grocery store spaghetti started to feel almost criminal. I got brave. Would my real Italian neighbors in Brooklyn - one from Bologna and the other, Tuscany - be willing to try some of my new-found love for handmade pasta? Satisfying their palettes would be reassuring - a blessing even. They asked for second helpings and encouraged me to keep going.
A few weeks later, I found myself scrambling across the East River into Manhattan on a gray Thursday morning to meet eight teenagers who wanted to learn.
Chefs for Impact and the Lower East Side Ecology Center, two NYC-based non-profits, collaboratively host a summer program each year to teach high school students about food systems, sustainability, and of course … cooking. Through a series of fortunate events and happy accidents, I was asked to lead a class on pasta making. A few minutes before 9 AM, I stumbled out of a taxi about a block and a half from the tiny, brick building I was looking for with two huge totes hanging from my shoulders - six pounds of semolina flour, a bucket of cherry tomatoes, garlic, and parmesan cheese. I hiked up the street, misted by the morning’s precipitation; but I wouldn’t be deterred from putting together a good meal! Once I stopped sweating and the gracious group leader was able to calm my nerves, we rearranged the café space at the 6th Street Community Center into a half-cocked classroom. The café tables became little tomato-chopping stations and we staged three old electric burners across the bar - all the while praying that the outlets tucked underneath could power them all simultaneously. Though I had never learned anything about cooking through my own Italian ancestors, I felt ready to introduce a new generation to the magic of making pasta by hand.
It’s hard to hold the attention of any teenager, but feeding them helps! Dumping a pile of flour directly on the table in front of them is even better!
It turns out that the immediacy of raw ingredients and the effects of gravity are indeed thrilling enough to keep the distractions of technology at bay. But if you really want to captivate your audience, do not check your ingredients ahead of time for nefarious surprises like weevils (tiny bugs that enjoy semolina flour almost as much as we do). Who needs captivating content when you can shock and scare the children in your care with bugs?! After throwing away the flour I had just procured the night before, we sat empty-handed with a new challenge in front of us. I happened to bring a little bit of flour from my own pantry (bug-free) and filled some time with a demonstration while my incredibly gracious colleague Jen (on her bicycle) swept across the East Village in a mad, desperate search for semolina flour. After a fruitless hour, scouring every store, we miraculously found a sealed bag of semolina hiding in plain sight on a back shelf in the kitchen at the community center. A little adventure keeps things interesting.
Fresh piles of clean flour now graced each table. I poured a half cup of water into a small depression in the center of each - leaving only a frail wall between the students and a cascading flood. Semolina absorbs water quickly, so kneading can quickly replace the impending deluge. Once the dough is formed, it requires a ten-minute nap before it can be cut and shaped. We were in business!
In the meantime, great pasta always starts with a good sauce. When tomatoes are in season, it’s hard not to fall in love with them.
We took full advantage of the late summer tomato bounty by throwing them together with the rest of the ingredients I hauled from Brooklyn, along with some fresh basil from the ecology center’s community garden. Everything went into our communal skillets on the bar and simmered away while we finished cutting and shaping the pasta dough. Really good tomato sauce doesn’t require much. Fresh ingredients, prepared simply, are the core of Italian cooking. Just remember to check for bugs!
And if you do make this out of season (I have some opinions), always use canned tomatoes! Roma are excellent. Though it seems counterintuitive, from the moment a canned tomato gets sealed up in aluminum, it is infinitely fresher than anything hauled into a grocery store in the dead of winter. For a significant portion of the Western world, many foods have a ubiquitous presence in modern life - year-round. Screw convenience – along with saving time and money (here come the opinions). Don’t eat “fresh” tomatoes in winter. They will be pale, flavorless, and likely shipped from thousands of miles away. Unless they were grown in a greenhouse, canned is superior. If you can access one, go to a farmers market. These will be the freshest in summer if you live in the United States. Even better - grow your own! We are too busy and distracted to care where things come from or how they are made (and by whom), much less to take the time to learn to make them ourselves.
NYC Green Markets - Grand Army Plaza (Brooklyn): These are from Evolutionary Organics, based in New Paltz, NY.
Handmade Pasta with Tomato Sauce
Step-by-step instructions can be found in the full recipe linked above (and in the photos below demonstrating each step). Once you make this a few times, it becomes second nature and makes for an excellent party food. Put your friends and family to work.
