ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Dinner SOS, food director and host Chris Morocco is joined by food editor Shilpa Uskokovic to help caller Eddie complete his quest to successfully make fresh pasta at home.
Eddie has a love-hate relationship when it comes to cooking (or baking) anything that involves dough. His attempts at homemade pasta have resulted in a crumbly dry mess. He wants pasta making to be a back pocket skill, and Chris knows just the tool that can help him: a kitchen scale. Chris calls on Shilpa, the unofficial head of Team Scale, to help.
Shilpa’s first question whenever someone says they love to cook but aren’t a great baker is, “Have you used a scale?” Using a scale eliminates human error (we all measure flour differently!) and delivers measurements in grams rather than cups of flour. Shilpa explains that making fresh pasta all comes down to knowing one ratio of flour to water, specifically two parts flour to one part water by weight. For you bread heads out there, yes, that means 50% hydration, or 100 grams of flour to 50 grams of water.
Shilpa shares recipes for noodles that all start with this same base dough, which unlocks a lot of options for Eddie—there’s scissor-cut, hand-pulled, and spicy kimchi sujebi. Chris suggests Shilpa’s recipe for Fresh Pasta with Buttered Tomatoes, which also calls for just two ingredients: semolina flour and hot water (which reduces the kneading time to minutes and yields a silky dough that’s so easy to roll out, you can do it by hand with a rolling pin). The pasta gets tossed in a quick-cooking sauce that relies on Sun Gold or cherry tomatoes, plus a healthy amount of butter and Parmesan, for decadent simplicity.
Listen now to hear how Eddie fares with his quest to conquer making homemade fresh pasta and whether Shilpa’s favorite kitchen gadget tips the scale.
