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settle, I discovered the America’s Test Kitchen pasta tutorial on video. Bridget Lancaster, the instructor, seemed to view people who made pasta by hand with the sort of disdain you might reserve for some- one seeking to make authentic water by combing two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Why bother? Lancaster makes her pasta dough in a food processor. Flour + eggs + electricity, and voila! So I pulled out my seldom-used food processor and discovered that she was right. Just a minute or two of processing accomplished what it had taken me 10 minutes to accomplish by hand — and with far less mess. By the time I took the rested dough from the refrigerator and flattened it enough to pass through the widest setting on my hand-crank pasta machine, I felt like an expert. The dough passed through each succes- sive setting as easily as the dough I’d seen the experts making. After pass- ing the flattened dough through the cutter attachment, I was soon hold- ing my very own linguini in my hands. A couple of minutes in boiling water and my pasta was ready. I must admit that I didn’t invite anyone over to share my masterpiece pasta because, frankly, I assumed it’d turn out badly the first time. When it didn’t fail, only I was there to witness it. I chopped a clove of garlic as finely as I could. I added the garlic, some extra virgin olive oil, salt, freshly grated Parmesan cheese and ground red peppercorns I’d brought back from the aforementioned trip to Madagascar to a pan and heated it. Then I added my handmade pasta. The delicious result brought a smile to my face, representing as it did one man’s fresh, homemade victory. "In our New Iberia kitchen, Joe’s Spaghetti Pot was our largest (but rarely pressed into everyday service) cook- ing vessel ... it only got trotted out for special occa- sions, though not the ones that show up on any holiday calendar." – Pableaux John- son, My Rouses Everyday , September & October 2018. Read the complete story at www.rouses.com.

recipes call for nothing more exotic than regular all-purpose flour. Egg yolks give pasta a rich, yellow color. But, according to “The Science of the Best Fresh Pasta,” an article on SeriousEats.com, egg yolks present a potential problem in pasta making. Niki Achitoff-Gray writes, “An all-yolk pasta may make great noodles, but it's not sufficiently elastic to use for stuffed pastas, which require a dough that can be rolled more thinly and is, quite simply, bendier.” Bendier? Be that as it may, for spaghetti and linguini and the like, all whole-egg pasta is fine, and you don’t have to fret over what to do with the leftover whites. Pasta made with only water will be light in color, bland in flavor and soft in texture. The general consensus is that making pasta using whole eggs is best. Experts differ as to whether olive oil makes pasta dough better or worse. It certainly adds flavor and color, but it can make the dough more difficult to work with and more prone to cracking when it is passed through the pasta machine. I settled on whole-egg pasta and equal portions of semolina and all- purpose flour. When it comes to actually making the dough, the most common approach is to pour the measured flour onto your work surface, and then create a space or “well” in the center that is clear of flour. It should look kind of like a volcano. You then crack your eggs and put them into that well. Then by fork or by hand you blend the flour and eggs slowly, starting with the flour closest to the egg well. Once the eggs have been fully incor- porated, the dough will feel stiff, as if it needs more moisture. But if you continue kneading it by hand, it will soften almost magically. This is exactly what I did, reasoning that if my pasta was really going to be fait à la main I needed to get my hands dirty. So far, so good. I wrapped my finished pasta dough in plastic wrap and placed it in the refrigerator, as the experts tell you to do. While waiting the requi- site 30 minutes for the dough to

34 MARCH•APRIL 2019

Niki Achitoff-Gray