Wild Boar Ragu over Fresh Pasta Rags

“Making pasta for the first time felt like a mature act, on the level of hiring an accountant or buying A Love Supreme on 180-gram vinyl.” –Kevin Pang of The Takeout

Making your own pasta is a joyous experience, a relaxing and satisfying escapist endeavor, the hallmark of true adulting. Why yes, this is going to be one of those annoying food blog posts waxing ineloquent about the blissful pleasures of home cooking, about the self-congratulatory sense of needlessly going to the trouble to make something from scratch. We’re going to be supercilious, just for a few minutes, while we float by the mass-produced boxed dried pasta on the “Italian aisle” in the grocery store. And we’re going to like it, dammit.

We’re going to talk about the superior taste of fresh pasta, the silky strands or shards that attract sauce so much more successfully than their dried cousins. We’ll discuss to annoying degrees the soft texture that almost melts in your mouth. And how about cooking times! Fresh pasta cooks so much faster than dried! We’ll bleat about how sophisticated and romantic we feel upon setting a bowl of fresh spaghetti strands lightly sauced with alio e olio for our date, or how we will DARE our in-laws to say something snotty after they experience the unique mouthfeel of eggy, rich fresh pappardelle tangled with slow-simmered bolognese. We will smugly fall into bed after the dishes have (not) been washed, thinking of how enlightened we are, how much we go the extra mile for the ones we love and host.

Okay. That’s quite enough. We can be done with that shit now. I began making fresh pasta about three or so years ago, and I’ve made it on a consistent enough basis that I feel comfortable blathering to you about its particulars without showing my ass. The good news is that it’s way easier than you think. The bad news is that it does take some practice, and I’ve yet to see recipe instructions that perfectly aligned with reality. There are just too many variables at play, like your weather that day, the air temperature in your kitchen, and what machine you’re using to roll out the dough. Before I scare you off, also know that there are easy fixes to all the little quirks that arise during the process, and at the end of the day, pasta dough is pretty hard to irreparably screw up. If it was, I’d have done it by now.

With making fresh pasta, you’re really mastering a guideline, and adjusting as you need to. It’s really about learning how the dough is supposed to feel, and then never forgetting or failing to make time to rest it before rolling it out like those poor Chopped contestants. (Every fucking time!). When it comes to the dry-to-liquid ratios, never be afraid to adjust and deviate from the recipe. If it’s not coming together, add a little water. If it’s too wet, add a little flour. It’s fine, you’re not going to screw it up. Knead as long as is necessary and no further. Sometimes that will align with the recipe, sometimes it won’t. Trust yourself more than the printed word.

I adapted this recipe from The Mozza Cookbook, of course written by the inimitable Los Angeles-based restaurateur Nancy Silverton, and it’s one of many fresh pasta recipes in the book. I’ve made this one three separate times, and it didn’t ever behave consistently. Yet it worked each time and always turned out spectacular and drew swooning compliments from diners, so you get my point here. For instance, she calls for kneading the dough for twenty (!!) minutes. Twice it only took me ten minutes to get the desired texture – smooth and supple, not grainy or crumbly, not wet enough to be sticky or tacky but not dry – and one time it took twenty-five minutes. I don’t know. Twice it behaved beautifully after the resting period, and once I had to sit it at room temperature about five minutes to get it to not tear when being rolled through the machine. Again, I don’t know. The point is, I don’t have to know. It always worked if I just listened to the dough and gave it what it needed. This recipe will sound complicated but it’s actually quite forgiving.

This particular recipe calls for twelve (!!) extra-large egg yolks. And since this is Italian food titan Nancy Silverton talking, we’re not going to question it. We’re just going to dutifully buy a dozen extra-large eggs instead of our usual large. But. Unless you are just that devoted to the baking of Ina Garten, you probably don’t keep extra-large eggs around and you just bought the one carton for this recipe. And you’ll need all of the eggs, which might make you nervous. Don’t be. I can assure you, that if you drop one extra-large egg yolk on the floor (and step in it – IN YOUR SOCKS!), you can add one whole large egg from your fridge, and things will work just fine.

The one caution I will throw out is that Silverton says this particular dough is meant for this particular shape, the fancy word for which is maltagliati, or “badly torn”. So I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable saying, yeah sure, run it through the spaghetti cutter! I can’t promise you that would work. The good news is, this maltagliati cut is awesome and fun, so you don’t need to make spaghetti this time. Mozza’s instructions are to carefully trim off the rough edges and cut it evenly and neatly with a ruler. Really? How about no. I used a pizza cutter to rip this into messy shards oh, roughly the same size. I embraced the scraggly, uneven edges, I made this into a true “badly torn” raggedy, rustic dish. With zero apologies.

Wild boar is unusual and lovely and interesting and so worth using if you can find it, but you can sub in lamb shoulder as a one-for-one substitution for this recipe, or you can make whatever ragu you prefer instead. I’m sure bolognese would be wonderful as well.