Fractalicious: Fresh Spinach Noodles & Romanesco

I have seen pictures of romanesco online for years but have never actually found any in stores. That’s okay — it’s really just like cauliflower, if you disregard the appearance. But isn’t it one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen? Good thing nick has a camera worthy of shooting its amazing fractals. I found some at my supermarket the other day and wanted to make something pretty with it, so I got my friend sam’s recipe for fresh pasta and made some broad spinach noodles to go with it.

The pic shows the noodles served with sauteed garlic, romanesco floretes,  thinly sliced red pepper, coarsely chopped black chanterelle mushrooms, halved artichoke hearts, salt, and pepper plus grated parmesan. Sam’s fresh pasta recipe below serves 4 and does not require (although it’s a real time saver) a pasta maker.

Ingredients

3 c flour

2 large eggs

pinch salt

water

anything else you want; here, 12oz spinach and a few tsp parsley

Process

Depending on what you’re adding to the pasta (if anything), prepare the additional ingredient as necessary. I heated my spinach in a pan plain until it wilted, then squeezed it out as best as I could. Sam suggested that good additions are beat juice or basil and onion. Personally, I’d like to try pumpkin. Regardless, try not to make it too wet lest you ruin the recipe.

In a food processor, mix the flour with any extra ingredients and the pinch of salt. Add the eggs. You should basically wind up with a gritty flour. Now drip water in very slowly until it all starts to stick together. Don’t add too much. It helps if like Sam you have a jet-engine cuisinart or a kitchenaid standup; my cheap chinese processor was getting stuck so I had to do a small bit of kneading to finish it off.

Press the dough into a ball and wrap it tightly in plastic wrap, then refrigerate for at least a half hour and preferably the better part of a day or overnight. Then, let it sit for a while to get back to room temperature or it’ll be really hard to roll.

If you’ve got a pasta maker, go for it. Otherwise, roll the dough out as long and thin as you can get it. Mine was a bit stiff, so I wound up cutting it smaller before rolling completely thin (obviously if there’s less dough surface area, the pressure you apply on the rolling pin is proportionally greater in each spot). Use a rotary cutter of some sort if you’ve got one to cut it into whatever width noodles you want. I went with very broad noodles ’cause they’re sexy. Make sure to separate the noodles some rather than letting them clump together.

I heavily salted and oiled my boiling water before adding the noodles and stirred them aggressively while cooking so they wouldn’t stick. Fortunately, I had no problems, so maybe you don’t need to be quite as aggressive. They came out incredibly well and were really very delicious. Although I tested them for done-ness and didn’t keep exact time, cooking time was less than five minutes like most fresh pastas you might buy at a store.