I had already tested my hand at making pizza from scratch and my mom told me that before I leave Italy, I must learn to make handmade pasta as well. It was a quiet afternoon and I had nothing on my schedule. I had some flower and eggs to make the pasta, and beautiful sauces and spices to coat it with. I figured that the best way to tackle this task would be my usual method; look up a tutorial on YouTube. The passionate Chef Gennaro Contaldo had the perfect instructional video for me on Jamie Oliver's channel. In the video, Gennaro said "To make perfect pasta, you must have love, and passion. I'm sure you do have all this." I am a sucker for stories about love and passion for food, so I was immediately inspired.
I didn't have the flower Gennaro suggested to use, so I knew that my pasta would be a bit different in texture. You need to use the finest possible flour in your pasta in order to achieve thinner noodles. No matter how much I would work the dough, my noodles would come out fatter than the ones from the recipe. I was ok with that, because the whole point of home cooking is improvisation and making your food wish happen regardless of any shortcomings in ingredients. I did however knead the dough for a very long time in order to achieve a tightly-binded, homogenous mixture of eggs and flour. This was the best way to ensure my pasta wouldn't end up being too fat when I cooked it.
Since I had already accepted that this would be a very rustic handmade pasta, I didn't make too much of a fuss about how I cut it. I cut it into mostly uneven thin noodles that would absorb my sauce well and take on the flavor. I am writing this nearly two months later and I can still taste that beautiful pasta. My sauce was made from pressed anchovy sauce, lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, and pepper spread from Campania. Spicy, bright, and beautifully savory, this pasta was the perfect late lunch, and the texture was beautiful. Cooking the pasta to al dente ensured the perfect amount of chew. My advice to anyone would be, try making pasta from scratch. It's easy and you should follow a recipe, but take chances like I did! Even with the wrong kind of flour, you can make beautiful pasta. As Gennaro said, in order to make pasta first and foremost "you must have love, and passion."