Y HU OM MM E YG R O W N
W VIVA LA PASTA! Greenspoon founder, mother and entrepreneur Juliet Kennedy takes her love of pasta to the kitchen and the page! greenspoonke
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Yummy. Food. Drink. Life
hen I visited Italy a few years ago, pasta was high on my list of foods to go crazy about (i.e. stuff myself with). We arrived in the Tuscan Hills on a warm Spring day under achingly blue skies. By day, we cooked and kneaded and learnt about the beauty of creating pasta from scratch. By night we took the train into Florence and ate gelato – not because we needed it – but just because we could. Everything we made in that kitchen, we ate. We tasted a simple stock and watched as our usually impatient Italian tutor paused to smack his lips and tell us this was simply the best stock you’d ever taste. He walked around pinching our pasta dough to see if it was elastic enough and ready to rest. We stopped to watch him deftly fold cappeletti or gently push pasta through the ‘guitar machine’ to make spaghetti alla chitarra. We learnt that good pasta doesn’t have to take a long time but that Italians enjoy the time that it takes and perhaps we should too.
Allow me to show you how easy pasta is to make by hand. The word itself originates from ‘paste’, and that’s a little of what it’s going to feel like to begin with until you’ve worked some attitude and stretchiness into creating a smooth dough. You’ll know when the dough is ready because it’ll be beautifully smooth, and when you pinch it, the dough should spring back a little like when you push into the palm of your hand. Always let it rest – you’ve just brought two strangers together to create something entirely new – you need them to spend at least half an hour bonding in the fridge. When you bring it out, allow it to warm up a touch before you start working it through the machine, and even then make sure you start rolling with about a quarter of the dough you’ll make in this recipe.
