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The Story
This week we left the eggs in the fridge and the pasta machine in the cupboard, and made some good old flour and water casarecce. None of that fiddling around with egg to egg-yolk ratios and oil to water moisture levels; just two ingredients and our hands. And because this sort of pasta benefits from being a little dry as it’s shaped, you can prepare the whole batch in one go. It also makes for a great pasta to turn out madly and messily with your little humans, or slowly and peacefully by yourself. To those of you who fall into the latter category, appreciate that for the rest of us madly, messily, and with children are mutually inclusive.
The Pasta
‘Casarecce’ means ‘homemade’, so the first rule of making it is to relax. You don’t need uniform, even pieces of pasta here, in fact we reckon it tastes better if they’re all over the place. Little Al made his own varied mini-batch, and they were perfect.
Start off with our recommended ratio of water to flour, but increase either amount very gradually if the dough seems too wet or dry as you’re bringing it together into a ball. If you’ve ever wanted to practice making pasta dough by touch rather than measured ingredients, then this dough is a great place to start. Just add your water slowly into the flour, mixing as you go, and get your hands in there! If you go too far and it begins to stick to everything, just add a sprinkle or two of flour. Eventually you’ll have a big old lump that respectfully minds its own business, and is ready for kneading. As you sweat and pummel your way through the next obligatory 10 minutes of dough punching, you’ll see dramatic changes in the softness and sheen of the dough. This is the gluten doing its thing, and if it doesn’t bring you true joy then I’m afraid that nothing will.
Now, you’ll notice that we’re using bread flour. Ever since we gleefully traded a few serves of tagliatelle for a bag of this stuff, we’ve been obsessed with turning it into pasta. Its gluten strength and high elasticity give it a smooth texture but firm bite, particularly if you’re not using any eggs. I could talk at length about choosing pasta flour (little Al just finished helping me construct a storage shelf specifically for our 20+ varieties) but the gist of my hypothetical ramblings are: know your flour’s gluten strength, protein levels, and elasticity, and know what type of handling your dough will require to turn it into pasta. For example, 00 flour is often talked about as the essential pasta flour, but it’s a stretchy nuisance if used for the wrong type of pasta, or if not mixed with something of a higher protein percentage like durum semolina flour. By contrast, using pure semolina will give you a fantastic firm dough, but it won’t stretch too well. While it’s great for extruded pasta or things like orecchiette that rely on this inflexibility, you won’t have a good time using semolina alone for intricate filled pasta.
Bread flour is made of hard wheat, which means that it has a fairly high amount of protein (up to around 13%). When you knead dough, you’re developing gluten by forming cross-links between the protein types; so this flour’s higher protein level is what makes bread, and our casarecce, so delightfully chewy. By mixing durum semolina into 00, as in that previous example, you’re actually increasing the protein ratio towards something approximating that of bread flour. But it doesn’t end there: arguably the most glorious characteristics of bread flour are the strength of the gluten, and its elasticity. So it’s firm but stretchy. This means that your pasta will have a great bite to it, but remain smooth. Chewy, chompy, and refined. This is why we’re obsessed.
Once your dough’s rested for 30 minutes, divide it into 8-10 pieces, and roll each into long, thin sausages. Then just chop them into small lengths, grab a thin dowel, knitting needle, or skewer, and get rolling!
The trick for most rolled, stretched, or generally hand-bothered pasta like this is to balance the downwards pressure with the sideways movement. It might take a few test pieces to get a feel for it, but eventually you should find each piece of pasta rolling up and over the skewer as you pass it across the pasta’s surface. Let your casarecce dry out uncovered in the fridge for up to a week to maximise that delicious bite.
For the perfect paired sauce to go with these firm but creamy casarecce, try out our sausage ragu!
Happy cooking, and buon appetito!
– Al & Al.
Equipment
- Narrow dowel, or knitting needle
Ingredients
- 250 g bread flour
- 50 g semolina
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 80 ml water plus more if required
Instructions
- Mix the flours together, and form into a well. Pour the water and 1 tbsp of oil into this, and use a fork to gradually bring it together into a dough.
- Form into a ball using your hands, and then knead vigorously for 10 minutes. If the dough sticks to your hands or the kneading surface, add 1-2 teaspoons of flour at a time; if it is too dry, add water in similar amounts.
- Transfer to an airtight container, and leave to rest for 30 minutes, away from heat or direct sunlight.
- To form into casarecce, separate the dough into 7-8 pieces. Working with one piece at a time, roll into long thin sausages, of around 1cm in diameter. Return what is not being used to the airtight container.
- Cut into approximately 5cm lengths. Using a narrow dowel or knitting needle, and aligning it horizontally to each piece of pasta, roll from one long side to another. Apply gentle downwards pressure as you go, so that the dough rolls slightly up and around the dowel.
- Transfer to baking paper lined trays and refrigerate uncovered for up to 1 week. If you're looking for the perfect sauce to pair our casarecce with, check out our sausage ragu!
I’d love to try this soon. So I make gnocchi, but that’s about it for homemade pastas. So semolina is not the same as semolina flour? Everywhere I look, I just see semolina flour,
Thanks!
Hi there! It’s a great, simple pasta to make 😊. Semolina and (durum) semolina flour are actually two different things. They’re both milled from durum wheat, but semolina is the much coarser endosperm of the wheat, whereas the flour is finer and softer. Unfortunately, they’re marketed with many different names! We use both almost interchangeably, but generally the coarser semolina is better for a pasta like this, while durum flour works best in more delicate pasta. Hope that helps!