The Write Stuff

Dumpling weekend. Pork shoulder chasu filled yeast/baking powder leavened dumplings on Saturday night. Lazy Sunday and gyoza with pork and veg fillings: minced shoulder, ginger, soy, garlic, chives, chard. Wrappers were all done from scratch through an Imperia Restaurant pasta machine with the help of my lovely assistant. I don't have all-purpose flour (my usual caputo rosso), so I'm blending low protein Italian 00 and some strong bread to get the same effect.

Bit of a broth blitz the other day. Beef and chicken. Ramen results. Made a base stock of roughly one part each of homemade (frozen) dashi, chicken and beef broth. Tare (seasoning) was soy, salt, water and msg, I went at about 3/4 usual strength.

Fermented butter. Forgot to take pics of the process, so sorry about that, this is the final result! Super simple, and about the same price as normal butter, and takes a few minutes if you're using a stand mixer. 1. Grab some high fat cream.

Thanks to Aaron for making this mattarello for me. Had a piece of oak lying around for years that wasn't a proper cylinder, finally got it running for some hand rolled pasta action today. Hopefully a bit more practice to get the timing down a bit, took about 20 minutes to get this sheet into shape. 3 eggs + 300g of caputo rosso. Half of the batch for some pappardelle, and the other half for some farfallone.

Full volume water pasta method. Seen a few one pot pasta dishes around, I personally don't think they give you that much control over the sauce, so I do them separately. Italians may not appreciate this, as the traditional method is 1 litre of water for 100g of pasta (10:1). I used to use about 5:1, lately I've been playing with about 3:1. It works, is much more energy efficient, and helps make starchy water - great for sauces.