Jonas Kaufmann's Wigmore Hall recital tonight may not have a seasonal flavour, but his contribution to my new favourite cook book Die Oper Kocht makes up for it - a recipe for Homemade Noodles with -- wait for it -- Pumpkin!
What better excuse for a Halloween Koch-Up? I decided to give it a go.
For each recipe there's a handwritten (by the singer!) version as well as a printed summary and a few photos.
The summary in this case is on the skimpy side -
- so it's worth reading the author's tips to find out what type of flour to use and so on. Are those really the Kaufmann mitts kneading away?
I started by making the noodles, using 375g of flour (as Jonas points out, tipo '00' is the right sort) and three eggs.
I made a well in the flour and mixed the eggs in. So far so good.
I ended up with this crumbly mess. Jonas chickens at this point and suggests adding water or oil to help it stick together. But I've made pasta before, and I know that if I keep on kneading it -
I'll eventually end up with a nice smooth, silky ball like this:
which moreover won't need flour to stop it sticking when I roll it out. Unlike Jonas's. This is what pasta looks like when it's made of WIN!
I split the dough into two, and made a long strip out of each. It's not really thin enough, but I'd had enough of rolling at this point (pasta dough don't go down without a fight).
I rolled up the strip like a giant and luxuriously overwrapped ciggie -
- then cut it into slices -
- which I refrigerated in a bowl while I made the sauce.
I unravelled them (still not sticking together...) for cooking.
Meanwhile, the sauce. Here's a quarter of a small pumpkin, about a kilo.
After peeling and deseeding, I was left with the 600g the recipe asks for. It gets sliced and fried in a mixture of butter and olive oil with a few sage leaves.
The pumpkin breaks down as it cooks:
Eventually it turns to mush:
The recipe asks for 250g of grated parmesan but I used less.
I added it to the pumpkin pan along with 300g of mascarpone and some rosemary -
- then let it all melt together. Tastes better than it looks:
Finally, the sauce goes on top of the cooked noodles:
Yummy!
