pasta dough is one of my favorite ways to play with food. i mean, it is super sculptable and the shapes you can create are pretty wide-ranging if you have enough time and patience. for the past few years, i’ve really been into shaping the dough in a way that references the shape of the vegetable i am serving the pasta dish with.
last year, i made a mushroom-shaped pasta dough with a morel mushroom cream sauce and a long hollow tube shape stuffed with asparagus and homemade lemon ricotta served over béchamel. i got a lot of “how?”s. i’ve finally written up a recipe for the pasta dough with detailed instructions and photos on how to shape the pasta, as well as directions on how to prepare the accompanying vegetables and sauces (which i’ve updated and improved upon since last year’s renditions).
for the pasta dough, i am using an egg yolk pasta recipe, which i don’t make often but is pretty crucial for the mushroom-shaped pasta as it holds the shape better (if you don’t want to make an egg yolk one, you *can* make a standard egg version, but the shape will not hold as well) but it is not necessary for the asparagus pasta recipe. if you are choosing to make a whole-egg pasta dough - i am sending you to evan funke’s recipe. his pasta dough formula is perfect (and i love his cookbook, if you want to learn more about pasta making, this is the one i would recommend purchasing). one note though, i like to replace about 20-25% of the 00 flour in his recipe with semolina as this helps in creating a nice chewy texture in fresh pasta, but you can do whatever suits you best!
side note - i have been asked to add outfit notes to these recipes - i’m not quite sure where i should be putting that in, but adding it here for now unless anyone has better suggestions. the pants are courreges, considering the texture on the fabric i think the might be old, but am not sure since i got them on the real real (where i buy all my clothes) and the button down is from a.p.c.
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