The Spaghetti Incident: Home-made Spaghetti and Meatballs

One of the things I am most proud of recently was the institution of a new family ritual I call “Date with Daddy.” As any parent knows, it’s difficult to spend a chunk of meaningful one-on-one time with 3 kids aged 10 and under. So I devised a plan in which each week one of the kids gets to spend an evening alone with me, doing whatever they want to do.

This way, we get a good 2-3 hours together, just by ourselves, doing fun things and hanging out together. I’m not a huge fan of the phrase “quality time”, but in truth, that’s just what it is. I’ve been rock climbing and ice skating, I’ve had movie dates; night-time swims, walks on the beach and even, just long drives with my kids. They love it and I’ve been given this great opportunity to simply hang out with them, doing the things *they* want and getting to know them better. Good idea, eh?

Maybe I’ll patent the idea…

One evening Jacob, my 10 year old son, and I came up with this crazy idea to make spaghetti and meatballs entirely from scratch. It was slightly ill-advised, as we started on a weeknight at about 6 PM and – without any advanced prep work – this took longer than it should have. We ate late, about 9:30 or so. But the results were great, we had a ball and even the girls came into the kitchen to hang out and watch.

In the future, I’d recommend making the sauce (or the meatballs, or the pasta) in advance, but otherwise this was the best pasta any of us had eaten in a very long time. Oh, and the kids LOVED mushing the meat around and making it into balls and seeing who could pound the pasta dough the hardest. Probably a great way to spend a cold or rainy Sunday afternoon, too.

The Pasta:

Like the other recipes in this post, this was adapted from from Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking."

We started by making the pasta, well, at least the first steps, as the dough needs some time to sit. The basic recipe calls for 1 cup of unbleached flour and 2 large eggs. This makes about 3 standard portions. The actual ratio of moisture to flour is more of an art than a science, especially in the tropics, so have a bunch of extra flour standing for when you start making the dough.

Pour the flour onto your work surface, form it into a mound and make a deep hollow in the middle. Break the eggs into the hollow.

Beat the eggs lightly with a fork, like you were making an omelette, for about a minute. Then start mixing in the flour so that the eggs lose their runniness. Pretty soon you’ll be able to start mixing the dough with your hands.

Keep mixing until the dough feels smooth and fairly dry. Add more flour if it feels too moist. If you think it needs a bit more moisture, sprinkle a bit of water onto the dough. The dough is mixed correctly when you can stick your thumb into the middle and it comes out clean.

Move your mound of flour off the work surface, and then clean it of all loose bits of flour or crumbs. Dust it with a bit more of the flour and return the dough to the surface for kneading.

I guess you can use a machine for kneading the dough, but Marcella most definitely recommends against it and I wanted the kids to burn off some energy, so we did it by hand. They certainly enjoyed this part, too.

Basically, you use the heel of your hand to push the mass forward, stretching it out. You then fold it in half turn it 90 degrees and repeat. Marcella reminds us to always keep turning the dough in the same direction, but I have no idea. Do this for 8-10 minutes, until the dough is as smooth as a baby’s bum.

We stopped here for awhile and put the dough into the fridge to rest, while we made the rest of the food. This isn’t a requirement, but I’ve found that it doesn’t hurt the pasta much either. Maybe 30 minutes is what we gave the dough in the fridge.

After we got the meatballs and sauce going, we prepped the pasta maker, something I hadn’t used in years, as it had been in a storage locker. It’s an old Atlas Marcato, with an electric motor attachment, but it still works great and looks cool. Needed a bit of a dust off and some vegetable oil on the rollers, but nothing major – and soon it was ready to make pasta.

We cut the pasta dough into 6 equal hunks and then slowly fed one of the hunks through the rollers, set at their widest setting. This presses the dough into a flattened strip. Fold this twice, into a piece 1/3 the original size, and repeat. Do this 3-4 times until the strip is nice and flat and even.

We did this with each strip, laying them out on a piece of cloth. We then adjusted the roller setting to one notch closer, and repeated the process. This continued until we had 4 long, thin strips of pasta dough – almost too much for our meager counter-tops to handle!

The final stage is to feed the pasta dough through the cutter attachment, producing long strands of soft, beautiful pasta. You let this sit for awhile until it dries out a bit, maybe 10-15 minutes, and then you can cut the strands into the desired length.

This was a bit problematic for us, as the pasta simply doesn’t dry sufficiently in the humidity we have in our kitchen. The strands stuck together some, rather than drying out. I think next time I’ll try putting them (somehow) in a warm oven to help the drying process.

Anyways, after about 15 minutes, we threw a bunch of the pasta into boiling, salted water. We stirred it quite a bit to separate the strands, but we were able to (mostly) avoid clumping. Homemade pasta cooks much faster than the store-bought, dried variety; so it took only 3 or 4 minutes until it was done.

The Meatballs:

Adapted from from Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking."

- A slice of good quality white bread

- 1/3 cup of milk

- 1 pound ground beef

- 1 tablespoon onion chopped very fine

- 1 tablespoon chopped parsley

- 1 tablespoon olive oil

- 3 tablespoons freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese

- Nutmeg

- Freshly ground black pepper

- Fine, dry unflavored bread crumbs

Trim the bread crusts. Put the milk and the bread in a small saucepan, cook over low heat. When the bread has soaked up all the milk, remove from heat and mash it into a pulp with a fork. Let it cool.

In a good-sized bowl, put the ground beef, onion, parsley, egg olive oil, grated parmesan, a pinch of nutmeg (1/8^th of a teaspoon), mashed bread/milk and some ground pepper.

Knead the mixture thoroughly, but gently, with your hands. When all mixed, roll the mixture into 1 inch balls. Marcella recommends rolling the meatballs in the breadcrumbs prior to cooking, but we missed that part and actually added them to the mixture before we rolled them. Didn’t seem to hurt anything.

There are a number of opinions about how to cook them – in the sauce, by themselves entirely, or partially by themselves and then finishing in the sauce. We simply fried them in a bit of vegetable oil in a non-stick pan until browned. Needed a few batches in which to do this, but they came out fine. We drained them on paper towels and left them in a warm oven.

The Modified Bolognese Sauce:

This is the modified “ragu” or meat sauce that we made to go with the meatballs. It too, comes from Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking."

Ordinarily, you would used ground beef or a mixture of pork and beef, with a ratio of 1:2. If you were using ground meat, you would brown it with the onions, etc. after step 1, but before adding the milk.

Makes 2 big cups’ worth, enough for about 6 servings and 1.5 pounds of pasta

1 tablespoon vegetable or olive oil

3 tablespoons butter plus 1 tablespoon for tossing with the pasta later

1/2 cup chopped onion

2/3 cup chopped celery

2/3 cup chopped carrot

1 cup whole milk

1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg

1 cup dry white wine

1.5 cups canned Italian plum tomatoes, chopped, with their juice

Salt

Pepper

Freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese

1. Put oil and butter in a pot with chopped onion. Turn heat on to medium. Cook and stir onion until translucent, then add chopped celery and carrot. Cook for 2 minutes more, stirring the vegetables to coat them well.

2. Add the milk and let it simmer gently, stirring frequently, until it has bubbled away completely. This can take a while. Add the nutmeg and stir.

3. Add the wine and let it simmer until evaporated; maybe 5-10 minutes. Add tomatoes and stir thoroughly. When the tomatoes begin to bubble, turn heat down so that the sauce cooks at the laziest simmer with the occasional bubble breaking the surface.

4. Add the meatballs.

5. Cook uncovered for 3 hours or more, stirring from time to time. If the sauce begins to dry out and the fat separates from the meat, add a 1/2 cup of water to keep it from sticking to the pot. At the end, however, no water should remain and the fat must be separate from the sauce. Taste and correct for salt.

The rest you can probably figure out on your own… put the pasta on the plates, cover it with sauce, lotsa meatballs and a healthy dose of freshly grated parmesan. As that guy on TV says: “Boom, boom, boom.”

It was really great.

As mentioned, next time I think I’ll make the sauce and meatballs well in advance, as this was a little too much to handle on a weeknight after work – especially if you want to put your kids to bed at a decent hour. But with a little better time management – and drying the pasta in the warm oven – I’d certainly do this again.