Hand-rolled Pasta with Herb and Walnut Pesto

The most satisfying dishes are often the ones costly in labor, cheap in materials. This is that dish at first glance, but the hand-rolled pasta takes in truth hardly more effort than tearing up a large salad, and walnuts are not so inexpensive, nor the Romano.

The faultless pasta is the recipe of Mark Bittman, from his wonderful NYT "The Minimalist" column is tender and rolls out easily. The amount is good for just two or three people, if this is your main course and you are hungry. Of course you could double it, but I have found that this is just the right amount of work- satisfying without becoming unwieldly. I've always made just the one batch. Mr. Bittman serves his with a chunky pesto, but I have found these gentle rag-shaped noodles pair very naturally with Marcella Hazan's butter tomato sauce. I made that sauce, as I always do, but I have some nice walnuts. The original recipe of green-sauced noodles, and the jar of sweet walnuts, and the fact that I was taking out the food processor anyway, inspired two sauces- It was our first outdoor lunch of the season, worth every fuss.

We'll start with the pasta. I think twice before taking a bulky piece of machinery from the cupboard, and I'm surely not alone in this. But the dough comes clean away from the blade and sides of the food processor- worth getting out. That bulky atlas pasta machine? We don't need it- just a rolling pin (the weight of a marble pin makes even lighter work of it.)

We will need:

260 g/ 2 C flour

5 ml/ 1 tsp. salt

3 egg yolks

2 whole eggs

Pulse the flour with the salt briefly then add the eggs and the yolks and process until thoroughly combined and crumbly. Pinch the dough- if it is too sticky, add just a little flour. If it is too dry to hold together easily- as mine was-, add a few drops of water, and pulse again. do not keep adding water and pulsing until it forms a ball. The mixture will look like steamed couscous. One press of the fingers and it should hold together beautifully:

Wrap the dough in plastic so it does not dry our and set it aside to rest for half an hour.

It's April, so the basil on the balcony has only just begin to sprout. There is a robust sage bush, but that is strong on its own. A handful of that with a big bunch of parsley in lieu of basil, and walnuts rather than pignoli, and some browned butter (on account of the sage) standing in for some of the olive oil made a pesto that was less of a seasonal stretch, and hearty for a cool spring day. 

For the pesto, we will need:

A bunch of flat leaf parsley- 2 cups loosely packed

about 20 fresh sage leaves

one small garlic clove, crushed and blended into a paste with a little salt

50 g/ about 3/4 C grated Romano or Parmesan

75 g/ about 1 C walnuts

50 g/ 4 T butter

50 g/ 1/4 C olive oil

Soak the herbs for a moment in a large bowl of water

shake dry and wrap in a towel to dry them nicely

Brown the butter over medium heat, stirring all the while, until fragrant, and pour it into a bowl to stop it getting too dark.

Put all the ingredients into the bowl of the food processor, and pulse until it is the consistency you like.

That dark liquid over the grated cheese is the browned butter-
marvelously fragrant and perfect with the sage.

The batch is more than enough for the amount of pasta, and the leftovers are fabulous on bread, maybe with a little prosciutto.

Time to roll out the pasta. Simply divide the dough in half and, on a lightly floured surface, roll it out as thin as you comfortably can. Ours came out like this:

Now cut the dough into whatever shapes you wish- large squares will in fact mimic "fazzoletti" (handkerchiefs). Keep in mind, the pasta grows tremendously in cooking. Squares the size of four postage stamps will cook up quite large- dramatic and fun on the plate.

You'd think that since there is salt in the dough you would not need to salt the cooking water  it, but that would be a mistake. Salt the water as you would for cooking boxed pasta. The cooking time will depend on the thickness of the noodles and your own taste. Although fresh pasta is delicate and they say it just needs a whisper, these are quite substantial- I found ours needed a full 8 minutes. Keep tasting them- if they are underdone, they can be rather heavy in texture.Let your taste be your guide.

I also found I needed to cook them in 2 batches.

The pasta water is thick and silky and salty and just the thing for thinning out the pesto- the pasta soaks it right up so be ready to thin it down enough so that there is some sauce left on the plate.