Roll With It

Mixed by hand or machine, homemade noodles are worth doing

"WHEN I TEACH making pasta," says Giuliano Hazan, "I encourage people to make the dough by hand and to use a pasta machine to roll the dough. The actual assembly of the dough is a much easier step than rolling it out is."

Hazan's latest book, "How to Cook Italian" (Scribner, $35), details his method of making pasta in wonderfully clear and concise prose. His method and his style reflect his mother's. Marcella Hazan shed as much light on Italian food in the 20th century as Catherine de Medici did in the 16th.

When I first started making homemade pasta, in the late 1970s, I learned by reading Giuliano's mother's instructions in "More Classic Italian Cooking" (Knopf, $7.95). At the time, I had never seen real Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, had never tasted fresh basil or balsamic vinegar, and the only olive oil I had ever used was an occasional drizzle of the Pompeian-brand classic that lived in my mother's spice cabinet. If I had heard the term "extra-virgin," I probably would have laughed; I was, after all, still a teenager. But, armed with Hazan's cookbook, I had the homemade pasta thing down.

Long before I was 20, I dutifully made a well of flour, mixed in the eggs, kneaded the dough, let it rest and then launched into the laborious but wonderfully satisfying process of rolling and stretching the dough with a rolling pin into satiny sheets through which I could clearly see the light from the kitchen window.

But somewhere along the line, I started tweaking the recipe.

I found it easier to assemble the dough in a food processor. I didn't have a food processor until almost 10 years after I had the book, but I must have seen Hazan's warnings against this because I read her recipes as if they were Scripture, and there it is on page 157: "While the processor does a marvelous job of kneading bread dough, pizza pastry, it fails to deliver an equally satisfactory pasta dough. For well-structured pasta there is no substitute for hand kneading." In fact, I did hand-knead the dough — after it was mixed in the food processor. And to this day, that is how I make my homemade noodles.

When I confessed this heresy to Giuliano, I could read the puzzlement and disapproval in his voice over the phone, like a priest's whispered penance through the walls of a confessional, "You could have the dough mixed up by hand in less time than it takes to clean the food processor," he said. I redeemed myself only when I told him that I still roll it out with a wooden rolling pin — by hand. "Well, that's the best way," he said. "If you use the machine, it won't have quite the same texture."

In the end, I was absolved, and we agreed that however you make the dough — mixed in a food processor and rolled by hand, or mixed by hand and rolled through a pasta-making machine — homemade noodles are always worth the fuss.

Greg Atkinson is author of "Entertaining In the Northwest Style" and a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.