SMBC Season 1 Finale - Homemade Pasta

All good things must come to an end.

Move aside Epic Meal Time, this has to be the most epic video of pasta making you've ever seen.

This is SMBC time and we're making pasta from scratch. The Shok's bringing along a few of his mates and we're going to rock Blue Boar R top floor kitchen with some serious dough rolling. Wholemeal style.

There are no bacon strips in here.

Starting with 800 g strong flour (high protein content for pasta), 8 eggs and salt, we smash it all together into a proper dough. Easy as pie. Or pasta. PC can't find regular pasta flour so he goes for strong wholemeal flour instead. It's good for you.

Homage to Xinmei at Pudding Pie Lane

We're rolling Rick Astley style because we're students and never gonna give up. Who needs a rolling pin when you have empty wine bottles? In Cambridge, there are always empty wine bottles. And empty port bottles. And empty sherry bottles. And empty gin bottles. But gin bottles aren't cylindrical, and so would be bad for rolling dough.

When the wine bottle is useless, we throw it out the window. Defenestration is the only way to dispose of wine bottles. Then the dough goes through our brand spanking new pasta roller, increasing the settings until it's the right thickness.

Then we cut the dough like a boss. Are we finished? Think again. We cut the dough once more, this time with the pasta roller. Like a boss.

This is pasta madness.

It only takes a few minutes to boil as fresh pasta cooks quicker than the dry stuff. In the mean time, we blitz a ton of basil, extra virgin olive oil, parmesan, pine nuts and garlic into submission for a smooth pesto. We also heat through some passata for extra variety.

But wait, I bet you didn't see this coming.

It's the motherquacking Italian flag... buon appetito.

Next time on Epic SMBC, we roast a pig on a bonfire.

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If you were wondering why there hasn't been an SMBC in quite a while, it's because with the new academic year, the three of us (PC, Hangman and The Shok) have moved into separate housing...! OK so it's only like 3 minutes walk between all of us. We'll do something again soon!

SMBC #7 - Homemade Pizza

After the ridiculous excesses of our previous SMBC, M&M decided that it would be a fantastic idea if we all made him pizza all made pizza together from scratch. As our usual kitchen didn't have an oven, we packed our things and headed to the communal BA kitchen to bake up a storm.

Going on a recipe from PC's mum, the pizza dough was made by mixing:
- 600 g flour
- 1 cup milk
- 1/2 cup lukewarm water
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 1 sachet of dried yeast (or cube of fresh yeast if available)
- salt

Disclaimer: PC says this isn't the traditional Italian recipe for pizza dough - the real thing has a specific type of flour and no milk... apparently you can google it.

Once the dough has risen, it can be rolled out and shaped to your hearts desire.

We tried two different methods after this:
- either baking the bases first, then adding the toppings and rebaking, or
- adding the toppings to the raw bases and baking all at once
The first resulted in a crispier lighter base, but the second is easier, so I can't recommend one over the other.

Baking the pizzas bases first really makes them puff up, almost like lebanese pita bread.

The tomato sauce was simply a mix of tinned tomatoes, lots of garlic, rosemary, oregano, olive oil, salt and pepper.

Our collection of toppings included traditional ingredients like mozarella, basil, olives, red onion and peppers capsicum, as well as some less typical ingredients such as tuna, feta cheese and (heaven forbid) sweet corn.

Baked until brown, then best eaten immediately! Few things are better than melted mozzarella straight from the oven...

Here are some mugshots from the pizza gallery:

The old favourite, the margerhita.

A few more toppings: olives, zucchini, capsicum, red onion, capers.

Tuna. Is that weird?

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We haven't had an SMBC post in ages - we actually did this quite a while ago, plus one other thing that I'm going to post up next in a back-to-back of SMBC posts! And this next one is going to be the last SMBC for the academic year 2010-2011, so don't miss it! (especially the awesome video in the next one, courtesy of M&M...)

Hey Pesto!

I am the proud new owner of a coriander pot plant. Her name is Catherine. Setting me back only £1, she seemed to make far more financial sense in the long run when compared to the regular packaged stuff. Whether she survives to fulfil her potential is uncertain however, considering I just savaged a significant percentage of her foliage to make pesto.

Death by a thousand cuts, and yet she still smiles at me.

Actually I was going to make a regular basil pesto, but as fate would have it, Sainsbury had none of the pot plant variety in stock. I had actually only ever heard of basil pesto until recently, when I had a ton of leftover coriander after making rice paper rolls and no idea what to do with it. Coriander pesto is more gentle in flavour, which might be surprising considering it usually has a strong distinctive smell which some people can't stand.

The following recipe is somewhat plagarised/butchered from something Dr C cooked this one time a while back...

Fusilli with Zucchini and Coriander Pesto

Coriander Pesto:	Everything Else:
large bunch of coriander extra virgin olive oil several cloves garlic 1 small chilli handful of pine nuts parmesan cheese, grated	400 g fusilli pasta  2 large zucchinis, sliced into batons 100 g pancetta or bacon, cubed 20 cherry tomatoes, halved

Serves 3-4

For the pesto... firstly, look mum, no blender! College accommodation rules don't allow them, but a knife is perfectly sufficient.

1. Finely chop the coriander, followed by garlic and chilli.
2. Combine in a bowl and add oil until paste-like consistency is reached.
3. Add pine nuts then grated cheese until you're happy with the taste. A little salt might help too, or perhaps a squeeze of lemon juice. The pesto will probably get a bit dry after adding cheese, so top up with oil as you see fit.

I was deliberately vague with the amounts because A) I don't actually remember how much I used; and B) it's up to personal taste. By the way, here's a video of Jamie Oliver telling you how to use a knife. If you never really learnt basic skills in the kitchen (like me), this video is really informative. I first saw it at this food blog!



For the pasta...
1. Boil fusilli until almost cooked. Meanwhile...
2. Fry pancetta without oil (it's fatty enough) for a minute or two.
3. Add sliced zucchini and fry until they start to soften.
4. Add tomato and pesto and fry for another minute. Hopefully the pasta is done and drained by now!
5. Add pasta to the sauce and stir until mixed evenly and everything is heated through. Add salt/pepper/cheese to taste.

Translations:
* Strange people from some country called "America" call coriander "cilantro". Crazy folks.
* Even stranger people from this "United Kingdom" place call zucchini "courgettes". Don't be influenced by their madness.

Delicious beginnings... Gnocchi alla Sorrentina

It's happened. After much procrastination, months of good intentions and unfulfilled promises, this blog finally exists! For far too long I've been ranting about starting a food blog, so I'm both relieved and excited that it's gotten off the ground.

I was contemplating writing some sort of introduction here, this being the first post and all, but in the end I hope the food speaks for itself. So without further ado...

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Home-made gnocchi seems like a daunting task. Getting the right balance of potato and flour is a strange and mysterious art. My first and last sojourn into gnocchi-making ended in soggy oversized and misshapen mushballs, which was why I was so excited when the Dancer informed me that she'd enlisted our Italian friend Dr C to help us make the real thing.

We organised a dinner party and invited a few friends to join us for an impromptu cooking lesson. As it turned out, our Doc had only made gnocchi a couple of times before, but she assured us it wouldn't be very difficult, with the only problem being the amount of time it would take.

In the end, she was spot on about the time - 2.5 hours from potato-peeling to pasta-on-plate, which was subsequently demolished in ten minutes. Ten minutes of cheese-meltingly delicious heaven mind you. And even for the preceding 150 minutes, I had plenty of fun rolling the dough and shaping the gnocchi.

Here's the recipe; it's actually ridiculously simple in terms of ingredients, so it's definitely worth a try if you have an evening to spare and friends to enslave...

Gnocchi alla Sorrentina 

Gnocchi:	Pasta Sauce:
1 kg white flour 1 kg potatoes salt to taste	1 large jar (~750 mL) passata 1 block (~ 400 g) mozarella cheese basil to taste

Serves 5-6

1. Boil the potatoes for roughly 20-30 minutes, until they are just cooked enough to mash. Skin the cooked potatoes whilst hot.
2. Create a well of flour and add the skinned potatoes to the centre of the well, and then thoroughly mash the potatoes.

3. Bring in the flour from the sides of the well and knead until a dough forms. The dough will probably be sticky and too wet, so keep adding flour and kneading until a nice and elastic dough forms. The amount of flour can really vary - we used around 600 g probably. Whilst kneading, add salt to taste.

4. Once the dough is ready, take a handful and roll it into ~2-3 cm diameter cylinders. Then cut the cylinders into small ~1 cm wide chunks. Shape the chunks by rolling against the end of a fork. A bit hard to describe, so see the picture to get the best idea.

5. Leave the gnocchi out to dry for 30 mins.
6. Boil the gnocchi until they float, then take them out with a slotted spatula and transfer to a pan. Using a strainer might be a bad idea because the gnocchi are quite delicate.
7. Add passata to the gnocchi and heat until warmed through.
8. Cut mozzarella into 2 cm cubes and add to pasta, followed by torn/chopped basil and stir through briefly to get yummy melted strings of cheese.

Some notes:
- I'm actually not sure what varieties of potatoes are the best for making gnocchi. The ones we bought said "ideal for mashing" and they were floury and seemed to work just fine.