things wot i made then ate: fettucini in cream with bacon

A pasta dough is prepared. Obviously this step can be skipped by using commercial dry or fresh pasta

Bacon is fried, the fat drained, diced onion and spinach added with cream. Nutmeg grated in.

A hard cheese is grated to top, Parmisiano, Romano, or Grana Padano.

The dough is prepared from:

* 1/2 cup AP flour.

* 1/2 cup semolina flour.

* One large egg, that's what it says, but don't believe it, the egg was ordinary size.

* 1/2 egg shell filled with water as a cup.

The dough is loaded with chile pepper flakes, dry mixed Italian seasoning, salt and pepper. This is transgressive to pasta purity, but today I wanted the pasta itself to be exceedingly flavorful and not just the sauce that covered it. I swear on a stack of holy publications of your choice that it takes only a minute or two to bring the dough together and work it sufficiently to develop its gluten structure, but it then must relax to distribute evenly the hydration on the molecular level and to autolyse, a process whereby in the presence of moisture, enzymes release from within the flour and begin to break down the structure of the milled grain. Resting makes the dough much easier to work and it tends not to shrink back when stretched and rolled out.

So the dough is started first and rolled out, cut, and boiled last. During the dough-resting period, everything else is prepared. So the actual sequence is shown here out of order but in a way that makes sense for each separate part. Right here is where everything shown below the boiling pasta takes place, but instead the dough is being shown.

The dough is rolled out rather thickly for a rustic fettucini. The Atlas could be hooked up for the following steps but that would take away all the dough-rolling fun and preclude the practicing of seriously mad knife-wielding skillz.

Flour the dough before folding so that the individual noodles will unroll after being cut. The cuts must be perpendicular to the folds or else each noodle will be zig-zagged, not actually a disaster altogether, but indicative of novice careless cutting.

This ↑ is why pasta tends to boil over when not tended carefully. The surface starch that coats each pasta strand, even on commercial dry pasta, sloughs off in the water imparting structure and strength to each bubble so that they can pile up and spill over. It also makes the pasta water perfect for thinning sauces that begin to burn or become too dry. The starch within the pasta water is itself a thin sauce.