Can you make this pasta?

Discussion in 'The Red Room' started by gturner, Oct 20, 2016.

  1. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    BBC travel story

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    The Secret Behind Italy's Rarest Pasta

    It's so difficult and time-consuming to prepare, that for 300 years only the women of a single Sardinian family knew how to make it.

    Away from its famed cerulean seas, Sardinia’s craggy interior is a twisting maze of deep chasms and impenetrable massifs that shelter some of Europe’s most ancient traditions.

    Residents here still speak Sardo, the closest living form of Latin. Grandmothers gaze warily at outsiders from under embroidered veils. And, in a modest apartment in the town of Nuoro, a slight 62-year-old named Paola Abraini wakes up every day at 7 am to begin making su filindeu – the rarest pasta in the world.

    In fact, there are only two other women on the planet who still know how to make it: Abraini’s niece and her sister-in-law, both of whom live in this far-flung town clinging to the slopes of Monte Ortobene.

    No one can remember how or why the women in Nuoro started preparing su filindeu (whose name means “the threads of God”), but for more than 300 years, the recipe and technique have only been passed down through the women in Abraini’s family – each of whom have guarded it tightly before teaching it to their daughters.

    But after an unexpected invitation to Abraini’s home, I found myself in her kitchen, watching her work.

    I wasn’t her first guest, though. Last year, a team of engineers from Barilla pasta came to see if they could reproduce her technique with a machine. They couldn’t. After hearing rumours about a secret Sardinian pasta, Carlo Petrini, the president of Slow Food International, visited this spring. And this summer, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver stopped by to ask Abraini if she could teach him how to make the dish. After failing for two hours, he threw his hands up and said, “I’ve been making pasta for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this.”​

    Much more at the link. Making it takes patience. It's half the diameter of angel hair pasta.

    To keep the technique from dying out, they're trying to find people willing to learn it. But I suppose everyone is too intent on updating their Facebook and Twitter to make the world's rarest pasta.

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    Watch the training video. It's pretty amazing. I had no idea that all you needed to make fine pasta is some dough and your bare hands, as long as you make it 256 strands at a time. *insert byte joke*



    James Oliver failing at it.



    I suspect is lower hand wasn't pulling the strands evenly (his fingernails might have even been cutting the strands), and his dough was probably drying out under the hot lights and repeated attempts for the camera.

    Watch the lower hand in this next video. She's actually pretty careful in how she grabs the pasta, laying her fingers flat against her palm and pulling straight down.

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  2. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Yanno who else has been making noodles for 300 years that no one else knows how to make? The Chinese.
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  3. oldfella1962

    oldfella1962 the only real finish line

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    I love watching these "masters of their craft/art" doing it old school. Sad that these things can be brushed aside in our fast paced mass production disposable world, but it's nice that their art can be exposed to many people via the internet. I would like to watch them do this up close & personal!
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  4. Will Power

    Will Power If you only knew the irony of my name.

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    It'd be fun to make that pasta.

    Have it with lobster meat, those huge Australian shrimp, & filet mignon.
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  5. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    The question is how hard is it to make? I'm guessing the trick is getting the maximum elasticity out of the semolina, which might be somewhat different from the kind we grow in the US.
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  6. ed629

    ed629 Morally Inept Banned

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    My guess, you have to stretch the pasta at a certain rate. Too slow and gravity can pull it down. Too fast and it snaps. It's probably acting like a Newtonian fluid. It needs a certain about of force applied to out so it isn't too elastic or too pliable.
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  7. garamet

    garamet "The whole world is watching."

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    Where's Anthony Bourdain when you need him?
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  8. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    Sunday's episode showed one of those Chinese noodle makers who use the big wooden pole to flatten and roll the dough.

    Unreal amount of time and effort, but I bet the end result is fantastic.
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  9. oldfella1962

    oldfella1962 the only real finish line

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    This should be on MythBusters!
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  10. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    This guy holds the world's record for noodle making. The spinning prior to the stretching aligns the gluten along the length of the noodle.

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  11. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    It seems they have to make so many relatively short strands via doubling because a strand couldn't hold up much of its own length due to gravity. But if we were to put one of these top pasta/noodle chefs on the ISS, they could in theory take a ball of dough and stretch it into a single noodle about 300 feet long.
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  12. Man Afraid of his Shoes

    Man Afraid of his Shoes كافر

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    I'm making pasta right now. :)

    Not that pasta, because KitchenAid doesn't have an attachment for it.



    Yet.
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  13. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    So what's your dough recipe?

    I found one for pulled Chinese noodles that scales roughly as:

    1-1/4 cup cake flour
    3 tablespoons all purpose flour
    3/8 teaspoon salt
    1/8 teaspoon baking soda (to lower pH)

    1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon water
    1-1/4 teaspoon oil
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  14. Man Afraid of his Shoes

    Man Afraid of his Shoes كافر

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    Mine's just Just flour, eggs, water, and salt.

    I kinda winged it. I basically made skinny, 1" wide lasagna noodles, made some alfredo sauce, and sauted sliced ribeye, mushrooms, shallots, turnip greens, and a couple of slices of bacon.
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  15. Man Afraid of his Shoes

    Man Afraid of his Shoes كافر

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    Here's the left-overs going into the fridge.

    IMG_0521.JPG
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  16. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    You need to work on your cinematography. To me that doesn't really convey "going into the fridge." You need to somehow convey motion, or perhaps have a hot girl in a bikini holding the refrigerator door open with one hand while moving the plastic container of food into the fridge with the other. That will draw the viewer in, with questions like "Why is a girl in a bikini putting leftovers into the fridge?" "Is there a dead body in the bedroom?" "Does this scene convey normal life just before the alien ships arrive?"

    Your photo just says "food in a plastic bucket."
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  17. Will Power

    Will Power If you only knew the irony of my name.

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    [​IMG]
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  18. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    So what's the story behind that pasta? It looks interesting.