Mention the word pasta to someone and they may shrug their shoulders slightly. Yeah, they like it all right but it’s a quick dinner, or a snack for a hungry teenager.
The era of pasta as king of the menu is past, and with the proliferation of boxed pastas ready to microwave, it’s taken on a fast food mentality that to me is infuriating. This is an art form in other countries, whether it’s ramen in Japan or tortellini in Bologna. In the name of expediency, we’ve reduced most classic dishes into a TV tray.
Can’t we preserve the sanctity of one our oldest culinary treasures? Well as it turns out, yes and no, and pasta itself is partly to blame. By its very nature it is quick, adaptable and appealing to a large audience. It is versatile, taking on many shapes and sizes, malleable, taking on flavors not only from the sauce but even the ingredients in the dough.
All these positives lead to an inevitable conclusion that pasta is whatever we want it to be, and right now, that is convenient.
From the simplest noodles and butter, to the most complex, origami-like folds of classic tortellini, the art of making pasta has many levels. The choices we make will often dictate how intricate the dish will be, and those choices start with fresh versus boxed pasta.
The ubiquitous boxed pasta with its many shapes and sizes gives us the quickest road to a meal but not necessarily the opportunity to create inventive dishes or craft artful presentations. Boxed pasta is expedient, it fills a need and a belly, very rarely will it lift you to a new culinary height, but in my industry, it pays the bills.
A few decades back pasta dishes on menus were the foundations of a strong food cost. Loss leaders like tenderloin and seared tuna with high plate costs were available because we sold more pasta with a lower food cost and better margins. As people gravitated towards other foods and pasta lapsed in popularity, it became harder and harder to balance that cost. Still pasta hung on and kept its menu slot for another reason; its versatility.
Give me leftovers and I’ll create a pasta dish for you. Whereas in its former life a pasta dish was formal and rigid, the next generation of chefs recognized that moving product through the kitchen required a familiar vehicle, and the pasta special was born. A conscientious chef would try and assimilate usable product in a way that may have approximated a class Italian recipe.
Bolognese with pork instead of beef, an alfredo with shrimp or roast chicken was still at its very core a classic alfredo. The alternative though was a scattershot approach of ingredients dumped in a sauce, tossed with a pasta and presented as a brilliant new innovation of an old technique.
Bottom line, both sold, and both had their positives. The old ways were preserved and in some ways updated, the scattershot pasta provided some chefs with a way to test flavor profiles and get reaction or input on their own development. Instead of misfiring on an item with a high food cost we all did some test runs with a standard kitchen work horse and found that some things did work pretty well. Perhaps the ultimate plus in all this was the fact that pasta dishes survived the cut and began the long climb back to respectability, a journey that is still not quite complete.
At this time, we have an actual pasta business that operates as a whole sale shop and a restaurant. It’s doing quite well and it’s supplying area restaurants with product ranging from ravioli to ramen. We make our own pasta at The Sage Rabbit, and Sullivan University’s culinary program sets aside several weeks in different labs to cover pasta history and practical pasta making.
Chefs are including pasta in their tasting menus, crowds are coming to watch ramen noodles being made by craftsman who have worked for years in the shadows. YouTube is full of spots that take you through the process of making, forming and cooking not only the classics, but deconstructed versions that take a whimsical approach to plating and presentation in all pasta, and the art of pasta making is doing pretty well right now, a vital part of most progressive kitchens and badge of honor for the more traditional spots.
Which brings us back to my original rant: where’s the respect for pasta and pasta making?
It’s there, maybe not in a glorified position, not as a museum piece, but more as a moving part of a kitchen. The boxes still sit on the shelf, you can now microwave mac and cheese, but you can also get fresh pasta in a niche by the dried, and you can get a pretty nice pasta machine for a fairly reasonable price, and make your own.
The presence of pasta on a restaurant menu or in your pantry suggests that there is enough benefit to the ingredient and all that it can accomplish, whether its helping a food cost or creating a quick dinner. The choice you make as to how you approach it will give you a wide range of options, all of them good.
Fresh pasta recipe
2 and ½ cups all-purpose flour
3 large eggs
1 Tbl. Olive oil
1 Tbl. CreamThis is a simple recipe that can modified to put semolina or whole wheat flour into the mix. Whisk the eggs. On your table or in a large bowl place your sifted flour. Add the egg to the flour and follow that with the olive oil and the cream. The dough will be mixed, either by hand or in a kitchen aid until it starts to come together in a mass. Separate the mass into four equal parts and run it through the pasta machine one part at a time until you get long thin sheets of dough.
If you’re working by hand rolling then you will have to knead the dough until smooth and them roll it into sheets. Let the sheets dry until they feel like parchment and then cut the form you want to cook with. Boil, drain and cool down or toss the cooked pasta into a sauce to finish your dish.
John Foster is an executive chef who heads the culinary program at Sullivan University’s Lexington campus. A New York native, Foster has been active in the Lexington culinary scene and a promoter of local and seasonal foods for more than 20 years. The French Culinary Institute-trained chef has been the executive chef of his former restaurant, Harvest, and now his Chevy Chase eatery, The Sage Rabbit.
To read more from Chef John Foster, including his recipes, click here.
