Pasta 3 Ways

pastaways

by leslie coons bostian photos by meghan spiro

A lt h o u g h i t m a k e s a good story, Marco Polo didn’t introduce noodles from China to Italy. People in the Mediterranean were eating pasta long before the explorer and merchant from medieval Venice stepped foot in China. While wheat was first grown in the Mediterranean, most food historians agree that noodles were initially made in China some time before 200 bce, according to Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking.

China and other Far East cultures originated a number of different traditional pasta or noodle dishes, including wontons, potstickers and filled dumplings. In Italy, postmedieval pasta makers formed guilds and were responsible for an evolution of the dish, according to McGee, who says they first prepared the distinctive style of pasta where it is served as the main component of a dish but not drowned in sauce, soup or stew. Most countries and cultures can now claim some kind of traditional pasta or noodle dish. Germany, for example, has spaetzle, Russia pelmeny, Poland pierogi, Mongolia bansh and Mexico fideos.

Regardless of its point of entry and despite its many incarnations, pasta remains one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable foods on the planet. Essentially, it is a mixture of flour (often wheat), water (or olive oil), and (usually) eggs—a combination that makes an affordable, approachable, comfortable food that is sometimes even considered a convenience food. Thanks to some local chefs who offer it fresh and handmade, pasta in the Hudson Valley can offer an amazing dining experience.

REDWOOD BAR + RESTAURANT

The “flavor-forward, modern, approachable” menu at the Redwood Bar + Restaurant in Kingston includes pasta dishes from different cultures. “Not being Italian, I am detached from cultural associations with it, so I also think of ramen and Chinese noodles as pasta,” chefowner Sean Tompkins says. “Pasta is hot, plentiful, customizable, full of tastes and textures—pasta is one of my favorite foods, from long before I started cooking.”

Redwood’s menu includes lamb farfalle with merguez, ras el hanout, ricotta, peas and saffron; spicy vegetable ramen with smoked tofu, beech mushroom, bok choy, sprouts and an egg; and soup dumplings with braised pork, ginger and cabbage.

“I started in the Hudson Valley as a cook when I was a lot younger, and, to be honest, the level of food at that time wasn’t optimal,” Tompkins says. “Then I went to Westchester to work with a chef from Sicily—I thought I would learn about pasta, but I didn’t.” He didn’t really understand the art of making pasta until he went to work in an Italian restaurant where “every pasta dish on the menu was made fresh, in house. I learned by making 10 pounds of dough a day.” Then a stint at a Mediterranean restaurant found him making “50 pounds of just fettuccine a week.”

Tompkins now has a kitchen staff of four at Redwood, which he opened with Kelly and Scott Polston in 2016, but he generally makes all the pasta himself. “I need it to be clean-edged. I am very precise about the shapes and size, just very technical about it.”

LIBERTY STREET BISTRO

With a focus on classic Frenchinfluenced cuisine, Liberty Street Bistro in Newburgh has quickly gained a reputation that draws customers from well outside the Newburgh area. “When we did the menu for the bistro, opening a ‘destination’ restaurant—a restaurant with that reputation—wasn’t my intention,” chef-owner Michael Kelly says of his contemporary American restaurant. Pasta always is on the menu, but one day a week it comes to the forefront.

Kelly offers “Pasta Monday,” a weekly dining event that “evolved out of the fact that our main dinner menu is pretty large, perhaps even somewhat intimidating. So we scaled it back and made the menu more approachable for that night,” he says.

Scaled back, maybe, but definitely not oversimplified. Monday’s menu includes dishes such as barigoule artichoke tagliatelle with a poached fried egg and black pepper; and porchetta and pappardelle with acorn squash, beech mushroom and chicken apple jus.

Dylan Ruiz (shown at right) has worked at Liberty Street Bistro since it opened, and Kelly credits him with much of the success of the restaurant's pasta program. ”He is one of the better (pasta makers) in the Hudson Valley,” Kelly says. Kelly grew up in nearby Cornwall, graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, and then moved to New York City, where he worked in Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery, Gordon Ramsay’s Gordon Ramsay at the London Hotel, and Markus Glocker’s Bâtard. He opened Liberty Street Bistro in 2016.

The kitchen has five chefs in addition to Kelly (“Only one less station than a fine-dining kitchen in New York City would have,” he stresses). Everyone stays busy. “We all enjoy making pasta and I like teaching new techniques,” he says. “New customers gravitate toward the familiar, like ravioli. We try to guide them to some other things.

Kelly’s pasta epiphany came when he was working in local restaurants, before he attended culinary school.

He bought a copy of Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook. “The book is sort of a bible to a lot of people in the industry—there is a whole section in there on pasta. Then I went to culinary school and made some pasta. I went out in the workforce for people like Gordon Ramsay and I made a ton of pasta. Making pasta—once you get used to it, it becomes second nature.” A customer favorite is agnolotti filled with mascarpone—according

to Kelly, “Filled pastas are where the real talent shows through— anything filled and then served with a light acidic sauce.” The Liberty Street Bistro menu offers a very rich, pressurized butter sauce (an emulsified butter sauce that is ejected onto the plate from a canister) that is a crowd pleaser. The sauce is key, Kelly says. “Pasta is a vehicle for the sauce,” he laughs. “You wouldn’t have pasta without sauce.”

MERCATO OSTERIA ENOTECA

Native Italian Francesco Buitoni really understands pasta. He came to New York and worked at San Domenico on Central Park South and as sommelier at Mario Batali’s Otto. In the Hudson Valley, he cooked at Stony Creek in Tivoli and Ca’Mea in Hudson before opening his Red Hook restaurant, Mercato Osteria Enoteca, in 2006. (Francesco is a seventh-generation pasta maker in, yes, that Buitoni family—the one that started making pasta commercially in 1827.)

Though the Buitoni name is well known for its packaged pasta, in his restaurant Buitoni serves up fresh, handmade pasta, a skill he learned from his grandmother. “I have been making pasta since I was a little kid. I learned from her so much,” he says.

For making pasta dough, Buitoni says the little things mean a lot. Buitoni’s grandmother “always used fresh eggs from the farm—and I use this little farm for years for eggs. I buy whatever they have. Eggs are very important in pasta—it is very important that they be fresh. The dough—it is all tactile, there is no science behind it. It is trial and error. It’s like making bread—once you get it, you get it.” At Mercato, Buitoni’s dough is rolled out in a machine. “We make sheets of pasta dough,” he notes, explaining that the sheets are used to handcraft the various pastas that will be on the menu that day.

The Mercato menu features fresh pasta dishes such as penne all’arrabiata with tomato, pancetta, Calabrian chilies, Hudson Valley cream and chives; and tufolli alla bolognese with a traditional ragu of veal, beef, pork and prosciutto di Parma. 4

Redwood Bar + Restaurant 63 North Front Street, Kingston 845-259-5868; redwooduptown.com

Mercato Osteria Enoteca 61 East Market Street, Red Hook 845-758-5879; mercatoredhook.com

Liberty Street Bistro 97 Liberty Street, Newburgh 845-562-3900; libertystreetbistro.com

PASTA ALLA GENOVESE

SEAN TOMPKINS / REDWOOD

Ingredients 6 pounds onions, peeled, blanched, julienned as thin as possible 2 cloves garlic, sliced 1/4 cup olive oil 1 pound veal shanks 1/2 rack pork ribs 8 ounces pork skin salt and pepper, to taste 1 tablespoon tomato paste 1 cup white wine 2 fresh bay leaves 1 cup milk 1 cup cherry tomatoes Parmigiano Reggiano (2 to 4 years old) serves 10

Method 1. Place olive oil in sauce pot on medium high heat. Sear veal and pork until brown. 2. Add tomato paste and lower heat to just below medium. 3. Cook tomato paste until it begins to darken. then add white wine and cook until tomato paste thickens.

4. Add onions, garlic and remaining ingredients and cook covered over low to medium heat until the onions have melted into the sauce. The sauce should be thick and orange with no visible onions.

5. Remove all bones from sauce. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Sliced cherry tomatoes and Parmigiano Reggiano may be added right before plating the dish. Serve with large extruded noodles such as paccheri or rigatoni. (For paccheri, serve eight noodles per person.)

Chef Sean Tompkins makes Pasta alla Genovese frequently at home, and his family loves it. The dish is from Napoli, named after the merchants who brought it from Genoa. Using meat cuts with bones will add significant flavor to the sauce. Pork or beef shanks may be used in place of the veal. The pork skin is important; gelatin may be used instead. (Gelatins vary in strength—use 6 to 10 grams of silver 160 bloom for this dish.)

AGNOLOTTIMICHAEL KELLY / LIBERTY STREET BISTRO

Ingredients PASTA 17 egg yolks 1 whole egg 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil zest of 3 lemons 1 teaspoon kosher salt 7 cups (800 grams) OO flour Combine the eggs, olive oil, lemon zest and salt.

AGNOLOTTI MASCARPONE FILLING 6 medium russet potatoes, whole 1 3/4 cup mascarpone cheese 3 lemons, juiced 1/4 cup butter salt to taste

Method PASTA 1. On a flat surface, create a flour well (resembling a donut) with a cavity in the center for the egg mixture. Mix the wet ingredients with fingers, slowly incorporating small amount of flour into the wet ingredients. The mixture will begin to thicken and get stickier. When you can pick up the wet ball of dough, begin to knead in the remaining flour.

2. Continue to knead the dough for approximately 10 minutes in order to develop gluten, which provides texture and resiliency to the dough. It should be feel dense and smooth when finished.

3. Allow the dough to rest at least an hour, but preferably overnight, wrapped tightly in plastic and refrigerated.

FILLING Preheat oven to 350˚F 1. Puncture potatoes with a fork and roast in 350˚F oven for approximately 1 hour. Once potatoes are cooked, peel away skin using a paring knife. Pass the potatoes through either a potato ricer or a fine mesh sieve to refine their texture.

2. In a mixing bowl, using a rubber spatula fold together the mascarpone, lemon, butter and salt with the potatoes. Pack the filling into a piping bag with a large piping tip (about 5/8 inch).

Making pasta—once you get used to it, it becomes second nature.

AGNOLOTTI

1. Unwrap the dough and flatten out into a sheet. Continually feed the sheet through your pasta machine while decreasing the opening size each time you put the dough through. When finished, you should have a very thin sheet of pasta, just barely translucent and equal in width the whole length of the sheet. (The dough can be rolled out by hand using a large roller but this method is not recommended.)

2. To form agnolotti, cut the sheet into 3-foot lengths, covering the pieces not being used with a towel to prevent them from drying. With the sheet laid horizontally, pipe a thick bead of filling across the the whole length of the sheet, leaving about half an inch of dough under the bead.

3. Using either water or egg-wash, paint a 1-inch stripe above the bead of filling. Then, using two hands and working from right to left, slowly lift the bottom flap over the filling and onto the painted egg-wash above. Do this the whole length of pasta, then take your thumb and tuck the dough tightly next to the filling down the whole tube. Using your middle finger and thumb on both hands, pinch off 1-inch sections of pasta to begin to form the agnolotti. Ensure that you pinch tightly to create a good seal.

4. Using a fluted pasta wheel, cut along the top seamed edge you created earlier above the tube. Then firmly cut through the pinched sections of the tube so that the top edge of the pinch and the top edge of the tube come together and seal. When complete, the pasta should resemble a stuffed pillow case. Cook the pasta 2 to 3 minutes in generously salted boiling water. Serve with a slightly acidic brown butter sauce, shaved truffles and Parmesan.

ROLL YOUR OWN Making pasta at home can be an enjoyable project that yields delicious results. Numerous recipes and how-to videos can be found online, in books and magazines, and packaged with new pasta machines. Most of them use all-purpose flour, water or olive oil, and often, eggs. Some chefs use farina or durum flour; both chefs who shared pasta recipes for this article recommend using 00 flour.

Francesco Buitoni, chef-owner of Mercato Osteria Enoteca in Red Hook, recommends using one of the many pasta machines available for home use. His grandmother cut pasta by hand at her home in Italy, but that is a much harder process.

Hand-cranked pasta makers usually are sturdy, metal, manual machines, priced anywhere from $25 to $150. They come in different sizes and widths, which should be considered when deciding how much and what type of pasta you want to make. One part of the machine uses steel or aluminum rollers to flatten and stretch the dough. Another part uses cutters to turn the dough into spaghetti, fettuccine, and the like. (You also can bypass the cutters and just fill the flattened dough sheets to make ravioli.) There are motorized pasta machines that cost from several hundred to several thousand dollars, and there are pasta rollers and cutters that attach to kitchen devices such as KitchenAid stand mixers.

There literally are dozens of different pasta shapes used with various fillings and sauces. (The National Pasta Association’s dictionary of pasta shapes at pastafits.org/pasta-dictionary, may be helpful.) Buitoni offers this modern advice to home cooks looking for information on how to shape their pasta: “Look on YouTube. There are videos now that show you how to do it.”

To shape pasta at home by hand, “You need a larger rolling pin and a good-size table,” Buitoni says. “You need practice--to get the dough really thin is hard. My grandmother, she made it look effortless.”

Above all, to make really good pasta, “you have to be attentive,” Buitoni stresses. “It really is a thing of hand. It is hard to teach. There is definitely a lot to learn but you can never buy a store-bought pasta, even fresh, that is as good as homemade.” Buitoni has supplied a tutorial for creating the pasta to accompany his winter mare e monti (sea and mountain) sauce.

WINTER MARE E MONTIFRANCESCO BUITONI / MERCATO OSTERIA

Ingredients 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 2 medium garlic cloves, slightly crushed 8 ounces medium shrimp (wild), cleaned, deveined and cut crosswise 8 ounces shiitake and oyster mushrooms (or your favorite variety), sliced (option: 4 ounces dried mushrooms) 1/2 cup white wine 8 ounces butternut squash, cut in 1-inch cubes, tossed in olive oil and salt and pepper to taste, and roasted in a 450˚F oven for 20 minutes. (May be made in advance but make extra because you’ll end up sneaking pieces to eat while you cook.)

8 ounces lacinato kale, center rib removed. Blanch in boiling water for 30 seconds; roughly chop after blanching salt and freshly cracked pepper, to taste 1/4 teaspoon wild fennel pollen 1/2 cup shrimp stock (use shells from shrimp and mushroom stems) (Option: chicken or vegetable stock) 1/2 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil, to finish 1 tablespoon good cultured butter, to finish additional stock if needed for consistency of sauce

(or use water that pasta was cooked in) pappardelle pasta serves 4

Method

1. Heat olive oil in large sauté pan, add 2 garlic cloves and sear 20 seconds per side, giving garlic no more than a slight blonde hue.

2. Add the shrimp and mushrooms, sautée 1 minute, stirring so shrimp cooks on both sides.

3. Add white wine and let the alcohol evaporate for about

30 seconds. 4. Add butternut squash and kale and cook 1 minute. 5. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and fennel pollen to taste and cook 1 more minute. 6. Add the stock and stir a few times, then turn heat off (make sure shrimp are cooked). 7. Add 1/2 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil, hot fresh pasta and butter. Toss.

FRESH PASTA TUTORIALFRANCESCO BUITONI / MERCATO OSTERIA

Tools needed bench scraper (optional) wide rolling pin sharp knife pasta machine

Ingredients 3 1/2 cups 00 pasta flour 4 medium eggs, preferably from free-running hens 1 1/2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil 1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt flour and semolina, for dusting

Method 1. Place flour in middle of table or in a large bowl. Make a “well” in the flour and crack 4 eggs into the center. 2. Add olive oil and salt, then beat all ingredients carefully to keep them within the well.

3. Once all are combined, slowly and gradually bring in the flour from the inside part of the well, trying not to break the flour wall. The mass will start to build in about 3 minutes.

4. Using a scraper or your hands, fold all ingredients together. Remove any dried-out pieces of dough that may still be on the work surface and begin to knead dough as you would bread dough. (If using a bowl, just use your hands to mix ingredients; once the dough comes together, remove it from the bowl and place on a hard work surface. Add water if the dough seems dry and too stiff.) 5. Knead for about 10 minutes. 6. Form dough into a ball and wrap in plastic, making sure it is sealed well. Let rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.

7. Unwrap dough and flatten it with your hands as if you were making a pizza. The dough must be thin enough to go through the pasta machine.

8. Run the sheet through the pasta machine repeatedly, making the sheet thinner each time until reaching the machine’s second-to-last setting (usually a number 2 on the dial). Dust both sides of the sheet with flour after each run.

Once the pasta is the correct thickness, you are ready to cut it into the desired shape. (The recipe for Winter Mare e Monti Sauce calls for pappardelle.) You’ll have one long pasta ribbon, which you’ll need to cut into sections in order for the sheet to feed properly through the appropriate cutter available for your machine. Adjustments may be slightly different for each machine. Once you’ve cut all the pasta, sprinkle it with a little flour and semolina and set it aside.

No pasta machine? “If rolling the dough by hand—good luck,” Buitoni notes. “Just keep going until the dough reaches the thickness of a manila folder.” You’ll end up with one large circular disk. Flour it well and begin to roll it (but not too tight) until you end up with what looks like a giant fruit rollup, he says. Using a sharp knife, cut the pasta to the desired width, starting at one end and working to the other end of roll. Then unravel the pasta ribbons and dust with flour and semolina to prevent sticking and to help the drying process.

When ready to plate the dish, plunge the fresh pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water. Cook for about 3 minutes and serve with your favorite sauce.