When I was growing up, I had an electric pasta maker, the Ronco model. My family always seemed to get excited every time I'd make it. I think I was maybe 13 or 14 years old when I first got the machine, so maybe I didn't really appreciate what an impact it had on my parents and even my grandparents when I would make pasta for them. But eventually we had used it to the point where sometimes we would hear a loud pop when we would extrude the pasta noodles out of the machine and it didn't seem safe to use anymore. So for years, it sat collecting dust in the garage because I wasn't sure it was safe to use anymore.
Fast forward to this past January. A friend of mine won a free virtual pasta making class. Now normally, the class costs $100, but for reasons I still don't know, she decided to give it to me. So I had to find both a recipe and time that worked for me. I chose a Friday, a day I had off, and the dish was classic lasagna. Now despite my Italian heritage, I am not normally a fan of lasagna, mainly because I don't like the taste of ricotta cheese. But this one just had fresh mozzarella and parmesan cheese.
So they sent me the ingredients and supplies that were needed, most of which I had. I did have to get a couple of things. First was 00 flour, which is a very fine Italian flour, commonly used to make pizza dough and pasta dough. Also I had to get a jar of tomato passata, which I had used once before when making meatballs. It is basically a strained, seedless tomato sauce without any seasoning. The toughest thing for me to find though was a natural fiber cloth to dry the pasta on. Eventually I decided to try to find a cheesecloth, and I went to four different stores before I could finally find it. Who would have thought I would have actually found it at Wal-Mart?
So mom came into town the day before, the class started at 5 pm. There were 15 of us. And we were from all over: Canada, Australia, New York, Chicago, Oregon, Texas, DC, etc. I had a bottle of red blend ready. I mean, is it really a pasta making class if you can't taste a little wine throughout?
We started by making the sauce. I sauteed carrot, celery, and onion, which I'd already minced in the Vitamix, in a good amount of olive oil. Once they had sweated down, I added a pinch of salt. From there, I added half a pound total of ground beef and pork and two cloves of garlic. The garlic wasn't even called for, but come on, how could I not? It took a few minutes for the pink to cook out, and then added 12 ounces of passatta, with salt and pepper. So I let the sauce come to a boil and then turn it down to low and covered it. The only thing I would have done differently with it is I would have drained a little bit of the fat off the meat before I added the tomato. But the smell reminded me of my grandmother's kitchen in Brooklyn. It just smelled so purely Italian.
Then it was time to make the lasagna noodles. It took 1 cup of 00 flour and two eggs. I poured the flour on a wooden cutting board, and created a funnel in the middle, where I would crack the eggs. I started working the eggs slowly into the flour and the dough began coming together gradually. Once I had something of a sticky dough, I began kneading it with extra flour. Fold and press, fold and press, fold and press. Then I cut the dough in half and it was time to stretch it out. This was the toughest part. After ten minutes of that rolling pin, I was sweating. The goal was to get the dough so thin that I could see the shadow of my hand through it when I held it up in the air. And it probably took close to 10 minutes to roll out each 4 oz section. But once it was finally thin enough, or close to it, I laid the dough out on the cheesecloth for a couple of minutes. Then I cut the dough into long lasagna strips, nothing too precise.
Into the boiling salted water the noodles went for 1 minute. What's so great about the fresh pasta is it would float to the top of the water when it was ready to be done. And then I immediately put the cooked noodles in a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking process. Then I had to lay the noodles back on the cheesecloth and gently dry them off with a paper towel to remove any excess water.
The time had arrived to assemble the lasagna. I used a loaf pan and it worked great. I started with enough sauce to cover the bottom of the pan. Then came a layer of pasta noodles, then fresh mozzarella and Parmesan, then more sauce, and so on. I think in total we had 4 layers of each before finishing with the mozzarella and parmesan. Into the oven 390 degrees for 25 minutes. Just enough time to clean up the pots, pans, utensils, and counters. For the last few minutes of cooking, I moved the pan to. The upper rack to get that cheese melted. A little Italian parsley on top for color.
I turned on the Frank Sinatra station, it seemed only appropriate. This lasagna wasn't what I would call pretty. It wasn't one where the layers stayed perfectly compressed after I cut into it. But oh, that flavor was so amazing. The sauce was so rich and the noodles tasted incredibly light, I had none of that heavy carb feeling that people often complain about after consuming a lot of pasta. I would definitely make this again and I would probably do another Nonna Live class too.
