23rd
Colored Home-Made Pasta
Speckled Pasta
These are a surprising delight, and since the strengths of herbs vary from time to time, will never be quite the same from batch to batch.
- 7/8 pound (400 g, or 3 1/3 cups) flour
- 1/4 cup or to taste finely minced fresh herbs, for example sage, parsley, rosemary, thyme, or whatever else suits your fancy
- 4 eggs
- A pinch of salt
The exact volume of herbs will vary depending upon the herbs you chose and their potency. In any case, wash them well, pat them dry, strip the leaves from the stems, and mince the leaves. Combine the ingredients and make the pasta. The best sauce here will be unsalted butter, and a light dusting of grated Parmigiano.
Red Pasta
The proportions are similar to those for green pasta:
- 7/8 pound (400 g, or 3 1/3 cups) flour
- 9 ounces (250 g) carrots
- 3 eggs
- A tablespoon of tomato paste
- A pinch of salt
Peel the carrots, dice them, and simmer them until soft in lightly salted water. Drain them well, blend them, add the tomato paste to the mixture, and heating it pot, stirring constantly, until it has become quite firm. Combine the mixture with the other ingredients when you make the dough. If you want the pasta really red you can dispense with the carrots and simply cook down a tube of tomato paste, though in this case the resulting pasta will be rather acidic and will require something along the lines of a cream sauce to balance it.
Brown Pasta
This is a comparatively new addition to the pasta cornucopia, and is made with powdered baking (unsweetened) chocolate:
- 7/8 pound (400 g, or 3 1/3 cups) flour
- 3 ounces (80 g) powdered baking chocolate
- 4 eggs
- A pinch of salt
Combine all the ingredients, and make pasta as you normally would. Contrary to what you might expect, it’s not sweet because baking chocolate. It will work quite nicely with rich game-based pasta sauces.
http://italianfood.about.com/od/pastarecipesandsauces/a/blr0001_3.htm
