2014-02-19-Use Your Noodle
Seminars@Hadley
Use Your Noodle
Presented by
Linn Sorge
Jennifer Ottowitz
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
February 19, 2014
Dawn Turco
Good morning and welcome to today’s Seminars@Hadley. I’m Dawn Turco and I will be moderating today’s seminar which we’ve entitled Use Your Noodle. Whether you call it noodles or pasta, macaroni, ramen or udon, everyone loves to eat this very versatile food staple. I Love Pasta, the national website for the National Pasta Association – and yes, we have a National Pasta Association – they say that there are over 600 different shapes and sizes. I read elsewhere that there are hundreds of recipes and I want to say that I’m adjusting that to say there must be hundreds of thousands of ways to prepare it when you consider its global appeal. Pasta existed for thousands of years before anyone even thought to add tomato sauce to it.
How much do we really know about pasta or noodles? The average person in Italy is said to eat about 51 lbs. of pasta every year. North America – well I saw the figure of 15 lbs. of pasta every year for North America and I’m guessing I’m somewhere in the middle cause I do love it.
Today’s seminar is all about this yummy food favorite. We’ve got a little history lesson coming; we’re going to cover tips for cooking, eating and storing it; we’ll discuss fresh and dried varieties and I think we will even cover playing with it. Yes, there are non-edible uses.
I’ll get us started today before introducing our presenters and what I want to do is do a little quiz and some of you are familiar with how we do that. So get ready – you’re going to answer A, B, C or D into the text window and then press enter. And here’s your quiz question. Who is credited with introducing macaroni to the United States? And your choices are A – Thomas Jefferson; B – Emanuel Ronzoni; C – Benjamin Franklin or D – Guiseppe Garabaldi.
So go ahead. I see we’re going to get started. We’ve got some bold people. A, B, C or D – Thomas Jefferson, Emmanuel Ronzoni, Benjamin Franklin or Guiseppe Garabaldi? Alright, I’m gonna give you the answer. Thomas Jefferson has just gone up a notch in my appeal, I’ll tell you. It seems that Jefferson fell in love with certain pasta dishes when he sampled them on a trip to Naples, Italy while he was serving as the U.S. Minister to France and this was back in 1785-89-ish. He promptly ordered crates of macaroni along with a pasta-making machine sent back to the U.S. So yay, Thomas Jefferson.
Now I’ll move on. Today’s presenters are Linn Sorge and Jennifer Ottowitz and both are instructors at Hadley and both have presented in a Seminars@Hadley room and often on the topic of cooking, which we enjoy these topics. So I am going to turn the microphone over first to Jennifer who is going to give us a bit of a history on noodles or pasta. So here you go, Jennifer.
Jennifer Ottowitz
Thank you, Dawn, and welcome everyone. Not only is pasta a very versatile and economical food, it actually has a very interesting history. There are a lot of claims as to when and where pasta was invented but the exact beginnings of pasta are a little unclear. The Chinese are credited with being the first to make egg noodles, as well as the first to make noodles or pasta from rice flour as early as 5000 B.C. But the Italians claim that the Etruscans first made pasta from a combination of semolina flour and water as early as 400 B.C. Now there are some claims that Marco Polo brought pasta from China back to Italy but historical evidence proves this untrue. He may have brought pasta that was made with rice flour, as well as the idea of stuffed pasta back to Italy, but the Italians were already making and eating plenty of pasta by the time he returned.
Now the Arabs are actually credited with making the first dried pasta. And this was easy to store and traveled well so it was carried on many long journeys, then boiled. And Dawn mentioned about how Thomas Jefferson introduced macaroni to America, which I love that story too. And as Dawn mentioned as well, tomato sauce was not widely used with pasta until later on. In fact, one of the first documented recipes for tomato sauce dates back to 1839 which I was a little surprised to learn.
Now we do have some other fun facts about the history of pasta included in our resource list which will be available on the website following the seminar and we’ll share more information about how to access that resource later on. So at this point, I’d like to turn the microphone over to Linn who’s going to share some information about all the many different sizes, shapes and types of pasta.
Linn Sorge
Good morning everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here. One of the things I find most fun about doing these cooking or baking seminars is that it prompts us to try certain things. We’ve been writing each other back and forth saying, “Oh, I made this pasta yesterday; I made that pasta yesterday.” So it gives us a little extra motivation and a few more of those pounds, not for pasta, but probably around our hips and middle.
There are so many shapes, sizes and kinds of pasta and noodles and I just thought I would go through some of them and they’ll feel familiar to some of you and explain a little bit about the differences.
Egg noodles, as Jen said, they originated in China. They are made with unleavened dough and they’re cooked in boiling water and generally they are made with eggs and wheat or rice flour. Sometimes they put tapioca in to add a little bit of texture and uniformity to the strands of the pasta. Most of the time the egg noodles batter is made and allowed to dry for a period of time before you actually use it to prepare a specific dish. I like to do this a lot; it just seems to make it better.
Sometimes you can get in the refrigerator area of your supermarket something they will claim are homemade noodles or homemade egg noodles or often at a farmer’s market. And I will usually take them out of their package and spread them out on a cookie sheet and let them really dry before I use them. I like a cookie sheet because that way they’re contained and not all over your counter so that if you need the counter space for something else and you’re wanting them to dry, you can pick up that sheet and put it elsewhere. And stir it around a little bit every now and then to make sure all surfaces get dry.
There are many varieties of egg noodles and the sizes vary from country to country. They’re typically long, flat strips of dough. The Chinese and Japanese noodles tend to be long, wide, flat strips but the German variety tends to be shorter, smaller and thicker. The true origin of pasta, as Jen was saying, is not certain but it is also made of unleavened semolina dough of either wheat or buckwheat and it’s cooked in boiling water.
In some cases if it’s pasta, vegetables are added to the dough so you’ll hear people talk about green noodles, you know, if it has spinach in it or something. Kids tend to like it if they will eat that kind of noodles because it’s fun to have the different colors.
Unlike the egg noodles that are flat, pastas come in various lengths, sizes and shapes and I think those are such good fun. Many times pastas are filled with meat, cheeses or other veggies and they’re served with sauce. Some of the shapes include spaghetti, angel hair and angel hair is very long but very fine pasta and it tends to tangle up more easily, at least many of us think it does. It cooks very quickly because it’s so fine.
Macaroni – you can have shells or tubes. Lasagna – those are big, flat noodles with kind of crinkles all along the edges. And there are things such as bow ties and rigatoni and they’re hollow tubes. There are categories of pasta – long-form pasta or strand pasta. That’s anything spaghetti-like that you can twist around your fork when you eat it if that’s what you like to do. They’re made in various widths and the thinnest is angel hair and then you go to spaghetti, linguini, fettuccini and if you use spaghetti, they even have what is called thin spaghetti but it’s not quite as fine as angel hair.
They can be round or flat, solid or hollow. Ribbon pasta is a sub-category of this and just think of all these different things you would see on the shelves. There are flat cuts – fettuccini is one of them; linguini so they’re the more famous ones.
Short-form pasta – it has several ways of it being – tubular from tiny to jumbo, smooth or ridged, straight cut or diagonally cut. That means the ends will either be just flatly cut or at an angle. I like the ridged kind often because the sauce will cling to it better and it’s not so slippery when you’re going to attempt to eat it.
And some of the reasons for different names is whether it is straight-cut or diagonally-cut. Then you have elbows like macaroni – many, many brands. Shaped pasta are some that are my favorites. There are bow ties, corkscrews, wagon wheels – all those different things. And sometimes it’s fun if you’re going to have a pasta kind of celebration is to make sure you get several different shapes when you’re doing it and that way everybody can know that this alfredo has wagon wheels and this one is done with hollow tubes. So it’s great fun to do.
There are truly hundreds of varieties. Stuffed pasta – this takes a little more time to make but it’s really nice – ravioli, tortellini – that kind of thing. You can get little ravioli makers that they’re little tiny… you’d almost think they were an odd-looking muffin tin and they have little square indentations in them and you roll out your ravioli dough and press it down in there. And then there’s kind of a lid that goes over it. So first you fill it with your stuff and you put another layer of dough on top and then you press this lid firmly down and it covers it up but it also makes all the little crinkly edges around all these squares of ravioli.
So now that you’ve learned about all the different – not all but lots of the different kinds, I’m going to give this back to Jen and she’s going to tell you how to cook most of it or at least lots of it.
Jennifer Ottowitz
Thanks, Linn. One of the first tips for cooking good pasta is to be sure that you’re using enough water. You should use 4 to 6 quarts of water for every pound of dried pasta and that equals about one quart of water for every one-fourth pound. And it’s important to use a pot that’s large enough to hold all that water because using this large quantity of water will allow enough room for the pasta to expand while it cooks and to help keep the pasta from sticking together.
Now to help season your pasta and to enhance the flavor, you can add salt – anywhere from one teaspoon to one tablespoon, depending on how much pasta you’re making. And you can use kosher or sea salt to further bring out the flavor of the pasta but when you use those types of salts, be sure to use less than what you would use if you were using table salt.
You can add the salt to the water before you bring it to a boil and you can also all one tablespoon of olive or vegetable oil. Now some people disagree with the idea of adding oil to their pasta but I like doing it for two reasons. First of all, it can help, again, to keep the pasta from sticking together, but more importantly, it helps prevent boil-overs when the water in the pot boils over the top and creates a nice mess on your stove. The oil can actually help prevent that.
Whenever you bring your water to a rapid boil, you want to add your pasta and be sure to stir right away. That’s very important to help keep it from sticking. Some people like to break up their pasta if it’s the long-strand pasta when they first add it and some people are hard and fast against doing that, so there’s some differences of opinion there.
You want to bring the water back to a rapid boil and cook the pasta uncovered, stirring occasionally. And by stirring every now and then, you’re going to help insure even cooking of the pasta and help to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pot. You want to cook the pasta for the recommended amount of time and this varies depending on the type of pasta that you’re using, generally anywhere from 8 minutes to 12 minutes. And I believe we’re going to include a resource with a list of the different pastas and the recommended cooking times on the website as well.
Now if you are going to use the pasta in another dish – something like lasagna or a casserole where it’s going to bake after you boil it, then you want to reduce the cooking time by about one-third of the recommended time because it will continue cooking in the oven.
And a few minutes before the recommended cooking time is up, you want to take out a piece of pasta to taste test it for doneness. And perfectly cooked pasta should be al dente which means “hard to the tooth” or “firm to the touch.” But it should be cooked through. You want to drain the pasta immediately and continue following the recipe because hot cooked pasta will continue the cooking process.
Now the question often is to rinse or not to rinse and you should only rinse pasta if you’re going to serve it cold like in a pasta salad, if you’re going to continue baking it like in a lasagna or if you’re going to sauce it later on – you’re not going to sauce it right away. Because what happens when you rinse the pasta in cold water and then let it drain thoroughly, it actually removes some of the surface starch which helps the sauce cling better to the pasta. So only rinse under those three conditions.
And another tip is to not over-sauce your pasta. The pasta has good flavor so you want that to shine through. A general rule is if it’s a thicker type of pasta, you use a thicker sauce; if it’s a thinner type of pasta like angel hair, then you would use a thinner sauce.
Now there are also some adapted techniques that can help when you’re cooking pasta, as well as some adapted devices. And first when it comes to setting the temperature on the stovetop, you want to be very careful not to lean over the stovetop to see the back of the stove when you’re setting the temperature, especially if you have food cooking on the stovetop.
So there are a variety of different items you can use to make nice high contrast tactual markings that you can both see and feel to help you set the temperature properly. And we included in the resource list again different companies who sell these types of products and again there are a wide variety of them.
When it comes to timing the cooking of your pasta, there are lots of types of adapted timers. There are some that are low vision – they have large numbers and good contrast - they’re very easy to see; some that talk and some that are tactual. Now when I’m cooking pasta I generally like to use a digital timer because it can help me get the time a little more exact. Sometimes people will use the timer setting on their microwave for this but they also make nice low-vision and talking digital timers as well.
A general stovetop safety tip is that if your pot has a long handle, you do not want the handle to hang over the front of the stove and I personally do not even like it hanging over the side of the stove. I like to have my pan situated on the burner so that the handle is either at the 2 o’clock or the 10 o’clock position and that helps me locate it easily and helps it stay out of the way when I’m working around the stovetop area so I don’t bump it by accident.
Now when I stir, I do like to rotate it so that the handle is down to the 3 or 9 o’clock position because I’m more comfortable stirring that way but when I’m finished, I rotate it so that the handle is back in what I call the safe position.
When it comes to centering or re-centering your pot on the stove, especially if the burner is already hot – maybe you’ve drained the water but you want to return the pot to the stove and the stove is already hot – you can actually use a wooden spoon to trace the outline of your burner and to help identify if the pot is hanging over the edge in any way. And if any of you have a flat top stove where the burners are kind of flat and flush with the surface, there are different ways to put heat-resistant tactile markings on the stove to help you use that wooden spoon to center or re-center that pot correctly and safely.