Unless you’ve lived in the immediate area, most people haven’t heard of Dave’s Fresh Pasta near Davis Square in Somerville. Somerville, you may ask? Where’s Somerville? My bad. I meant to say Sumahhville. The store’s been around for more than 25 years and sells all kinds of Italian specialties such as homemade pastas, sauces, meats, breads and plenty of other items. In other words, it’s a carboholic’s gold mine; right up my alley! Generally speaking, if we’re expecting house guests, this is the place where we will load up on anything from appetizers to ice cream. And if we don’t consume it all, it always makes for great leftovers.
My wife was kind enough to recently gift me a pasta making class at the store. So a couple of weeks ago we took the plunge. Having never attempted to make pasta by hand before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My first impression was the kitchen wasn’t particularly roomy, there were a lot of pasta machines in the space and there was a hot stove. All this made me pretty VERY thankful that only eight of thirteen subscribed guests were able to attend.
If you’ve never made pasta by hand before, I’ll go through a couple of the surprisingly simple steps. You start by beating an egg or two into a bowl, and slowly add flour to the mixture that eventually in theory becomes a dough ball. Then knead, fold, sip of wine, bite of cheese, repeat. It took us a bit longer to create our masterpiece than others in the room (and I think these people were definitely ringers), but fortunately there didn’t seem to be any outright hostility towards us. Next we inserted our dough into the pasta machine and cranked away to produce many items that sound like they end with an i: spaghetti, fettuccine, tortellini and ravioli. Finally, the best part of the class came along. Eating our creations. And they did not disappoint.
The verdict from us was that it was a lot of fun attending the class and learning how to make pasta, but we’d rather leave the cleanup to someone else. So, it’s unlikely we’ll be making pasta in our own kitchen anytime soon. I’ll be happy to eat it however.
