I began following Salty Seattle on Instagram about a year and a half ago after seeing an article on her on a major news website's food section and was mesmerized by the insane things on her feed. Dizzyingly bright colors of pasta, ROYGBIV rainbows of pasta noodles, all displayed so beautifully. I had toyed around with pasta making before, getting a KitchenAid pasta extruder and then kind of abandoning it like everyone does with KitchenAid attachments, because I was getting terrible results and the recipes online all sucked. Then came Pasta Pretty Please, Linda Miller Nicholson's debut book.
Extra Pasta Items to Buy to Use This Book
I preordered it on Amazon and sat down reading through it for most of that night. I flagged certain pages of recipes I wanted to try, and techniques to look over again. I ordered some 00 Caputo flour on Amazon next, and picked up an old hand crank pasta roller from my mom's. Everything was in, it was time to make the pasta. It... sucked. The dough almost killed the motor on my mixer, and it was a gross mess. I got it togetherish and tried rolling it but well, I needed an extra hand. I made Patrick help me and ended up with even more messy pieces. I chunked the dough and forgot about it.
After that I decided to look at the non-sheet dough pasta section, like gnocchi and had great success with the purple sweet potato gnocchi. I went on Amazon yet again and bought a gnocchi board. Then for Christmas, Patrick bought me the KitchenAid pasta roller attachment, both to make me happy and to keep him from having to help me with the hand crank one. It worked on both counts.
I tried again but had an issue with the dough almost killing the mixer. Finally I decided to start it in the mixer and finish hand kneading. SUCCESS. The dough got that elasticity it needed, it wasn't shaggy and it went through the pasta rollers with no problem. I followed all of the directions and kept producing pastas.
A Few Pasta Doughs
I ended up using a rolling pin to roll out this green pea dough and beet dough and hand cut some very uneven papardelle.
My first success from start to finish was green pea fettuccine.
Next I tried two new flavors and a new technique — two color fettuccine! Again, following all of the directions minus mixing the dough fully in the stand mixer, I had this amazing black and gray goth pasta.
I still haven't moved on to rainbow pastas that require making six colors of dough, but with enough time, desire to hand wash dishes several times over, and counter space, I think I can achieve it one day. I might actually try and trick and friend or two into coming over to help for that kind of intensity though.
Given all of this struggle to get to a point where I'm finally enjoying the book, do I recommend it? Yes, but with caveats. Plan to ruin a few batches of pasta. Plan to need to order a few tools and ingredients on Amazon. Don't plan to serve this to people for dinner until you've experimented on your own a few times with no expectations or obligations. And always, always have your sauce made before you put the pasta in to boil, trust me.
We may not all end up making everything in the book, but for those who want an education in pasta making, and for it to be a bit more brightly colored than your usual pasta books, it is worth it! You won't believe how accomplished you'll feel, looking at your pasta strands hanging so neatly, or your farfalle pinches actually holding together. It's a beautiful thing to behold, especially if you need a confidence boost in the kitchen and can handle a few failures first. Hey, you might not even fail if you read enough and plan in advance!
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