Pasta Mañana
March 22nd, 2005 by owenamSigh… first bread, then peanut butter, then hummus, and now noodles. At this rate I’m not going to have time to do anything else: this past weeked I bought a shiny new pasta maker. It’s steel, heavy, has some gears, a few knobs, a big crank, and a C-clamp for attaching to the table. Certainly nothing to complain about there… but I wonder if those smiling Italian factory workers in their cute little European cars would still be smiling if they knew that I haven’t made a single Italian noodle with their noodly contraption.
Instead, I’ve begun an ill-adivsed quest to make a perfect bowl of tonkotsu ramen. Failing that, I’d at least like to come up with something that people would pay five or six bucks for. Some people might say that because the soup is the most important part of tonkotsu ramen (I don’t think I’m going to bother italicizing that every time), I should just use cheap noodles until I get the soup right. However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about setting up Virtual Private Networks, it’s that you should put the simple stuff in place first, and slowly add complexity until you break something. And of course this applies to ramen as well. I think.
As it turns out, the noodles themselves are dead simple.
Ramen Noodles 0.0.0
- 2 cups flour
- 4 eggs
Combine the eggs and flour. Knead for a little while, then start passing the dough through the flat rollers of the noodle machine. As the dough gets smoother, use smaller gaps between the rollers. When you reach ramen-like thickness, run the dough through the noodler. Catch them and form into little noodle nests. Boil immediately, or wrap in plastic and refrigerate for a few days.
These turned out pretty damned good on my first try. A couple of notes:
The noodles often wanted to stick together as they came out of the noodler. I think that drying the dough out by adding a bit more flour would help this; it might be easiest to stick to the inital two cups and add a bit more while putting the dough through the rollers.
This recipe makes 4 – 6 servings, depending on how fat you want to get. To avoid problems with really long strips of dough, it’s best to cut the dough into pieces before starting to roll it: 1 piece per serving if you have a helper and want longer noodles, 2 pieces per serving otherwise.
Toss the noodles in more flour as they come out of the noodler — this will prevent them from sticking together during wrapping and in storage. The extra flour will come off when they’re boiled.
I used bread flour; I’d be curious to find out if I can tell the difference between that and all-purpose flour.