Spring pasta

Spring means different things in different places:

Speaking from personal experience, in Victoria spring meant cherry blossoms and softer beaches. In Whitehorse it usually means raccoon eyes from long days up in the Whitepass, and brown rotting grass saturated with water from the melting snow. At least it also means fiddle heads are back.

I found these in the store the other day and bought the firmest ones there.

Keeping with the spring theme of the fiddle heads, I wanted to plan a fresh, simple and light meal. I'm calling this:

Fresh pasta with portobello mushrooms and fiddle heads in lemon butter with garlic, sage and cracked pepper.
(Its me so of course there will be an obnoxious amount of Parmigiano Reggiano - or at least the stuff you can buy in the stores here under the same name - grated over top.)

I've been trying to find a gluten free flour that yields a firm and light pasta. So far experiments with garbanzo flour has given the best results when making pierogi and pizza dough so I figured I would try it with fresh pasta as well.

Basic gluten free pasta recipe (for 2-3 people)

Garbanzo flour (~1 cup)
Psyllium husk powder (~ 1 teaspoon)
salt (a little goes a long way in pasta dough, so use very little, (< 1 teaspoon)
eggs (1 whole egg and 1 yolk although I'm breaking breaking the cardinal ratio here).
Olive oil (~ 1 teaspoon)
water (only if dough is too dry).

Combine dry ingredients, mix well and let aerate for 10-15 min

Create a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, add wet ingredients and mix slowly incorporating the dry outer into the wet center.

When the dough starts to thicken, commence mixing it with your hands. Use your instincts, if its too dry, add water, if its too wet, add more flour.

Sprinkle flour on a clean flat working surface and kneed the dough, folding it onto itself over and over until the dough stops forming crevasses when its folded (~3min).

Unfortunately its hard to describe what it feels like when its done. Its still a work in progress for me and all I can suggest is to aim for slightly moist play-dough texture. Getting the right consistency is probably the hardest part but even crappy dough will yield edible and rewarding pasta.

Wrap the dough in plastic and allow to sit in the fridge for 45 min - 1 hour to allow the moisture to re-distribute through the dough.

Sprinkle additional flour on your working space and kneed the dough again until crevasses stop forming. Divide your dough in two and wrap the half not being used in a plastic bag for now.

I've yet to make a gluten free dough that won't disintegrate when rolled - probably a sign I've got a lot of room for growth regarding pasta making, but hey, its a journey. I just flatten it with my hands and try to get it as thin as possible.

If you have a pasta roller, you can try your luck with it, I don't and again, tend to make fragile dough so I cut it by hand using a straight edged  knife.

 At this point your pasta is ready to be cooked. It should take no longer than 2-3 minutes in boiling water for nice al dente pasta. Again, use your instincts, thicker pasta (like the lazy batch above) will take longer than thinner pasta and of course if you don't like it al dente, allow another minute or two.

Once the pasta starts to cook, it firms up a lot and you can stop treating it as if it will fall apart at any moment.

Once drained, just toss it in a large sauce pan with your favorite pasta sauce for a min or two and your set.

In this case I tossed it in with some blanched fiddle heads, portobello mushrooms and garlic saute'd in some butter with sage and lemon.

 Bon appetit!