Dirty Work: Mastering Handmade Pasta with Ryan Hardy of Pasquale Jones

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Dirty Work: Mastering Handmade Pasta with Ryan Hardy of Pasquale Jones

Ryan Hardy of Pasquale Jones shows us how to go from flour to fusilli like it ain't no thang.
Hilary Pollack
Los Angeles, US

Welcome back to Dirty Work, our series of dispatches from the MUNCHIES Garden. We're inviting chefs, bartenders, and personalities in the world of food and drink to explore our edible playground and make whatever the hell inspires them with our rooftop produce. The results: MUNCHIES Garden recipes for you, dear reader. This time, we make some drop-dead gorgeous handmade pasta with Ryan Hardy from New York eatery Pasquale Jones.

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You may think you love pasta.

Sure, you know your way around a bowl of penne alla vodka. You know the proper Italian names for fusilli and farfalle and bucatini. And of course, you buy your ravioli fresh instead of frozen. Good for you.

But you don't know pasta like Ryan Hardy of Charlie Bird and Pasquale Jones. His restaurants are known for their mastery of spaghetti, pappardelle, tagliatelle, cavatelli, and gnocchi; not to mention some pretty killer pizza, an excellent selection of wine, and a soundtrack of loud hip-hop.

Let's do this.

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Some people come to do Dirty Work with a specific dish in mind, while others fly by the seat of their pants. Hardy's not just making a pasta dish; he's making the dough and the noodles by hand in our kitchen.

Considering that hand-making pasta seems to be one of those tasks that most of us lazy home-cook normies just can't seem to wrap our heads around doing on the fly, that's pretty damn impressive in and of itself.

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But of course, as is the nature of this column, Hardy will also be picking the other ingredients for his dish straight from the vegetable boxes in the sprawling MUNCHIES garden.

After tasting a few herbs and poking around a little, Hardy grabs a few handfuls of hot peppers and a couple of eggplants, then checks out our humongous cucumbers.

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Just look at that bad boy.

Since we're going to be cooking Italian food, a variety of tomatoes are also crucial—juicy heirlooms and sweet little sungolds. A couple of bunches of fresh mint and fennel, a few leaves of Thai basil, and we're good to go. Time to make some pasta, people.

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Hardy has also brought along a hunk, and a very hunky one at that, of Marcelli Formaggi smoked ricotta. He lets us try a bite, and we immediately fall in love with this mild, sweet, and smoky cheese—a lovely preview of the flavors to come in his dish.

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Hardy slices up the eggplant and the tomatoes to make a sugo; a simple, stew-like sauce. The tomatoes are at perfect ripeness; a little acid, a lot of umami.

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On the stove, thick coins of eggplant soften and happily soak up EVOO and the aroma of sautéed garlic before Hardy adds the plump tomato halves.

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And a sprinkle of Maldon sea salt, of course, never hurt anybody—and certainly not a pasta sauce.

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While the sauce slowly cooks and reduces, it's time to make the pasta. Hardy starts with 00 flour, durum flour, water, olive oil, egg yolks, and a pinch of salt. A mountain of flour turns into a volcano as the wet ingredients are added into the well, then mixed and kneaded into dough.

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After a 30-minute rest, the dough is ready to party.

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Hardy rolls it out until it's about a quarter of an inch thick, then slices it into thin little strips. Have you guessed what noodle he'll be making yet?

We'll give you a hint: The tool used to make it is called a buso.

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OK, fine; it's a Sicilian pasta called busiate; long, loose, corkscrew-like spirals, kind of like a laid-back version of fusilli. If fusilli had just come back from vacation, it would look like busiate; a little more relaxed, like it's had a few glasses of vino and is letting its hair down.

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"It's a pasta from the west coast of Sicily, which is where I'm going to be in two days," Hardy tells us. "Every region has its own dialect for pasta. But it's a corkscrew—it's a more everyday type of pasta that you'd see, particularly on the west coast of Sicily, in areas like Trapani."

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Hardy deftly wraps each strip of pasta around the buso—which is basically just a squared-off metal skewer—and gently pulls it off, creating an elegant little helix of tender pasta. He dusts the noodles with more flour to prevent them from sticking to each other. (He also shares a cooking horror story about a time that a friend offered to help him make a giant pile of noodles, but forgot to sprinkle them with flour. After creating hundreds of them and putting them in a pile, he realized that they had all melded together back into a big hunk of dough. Whoops.)

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"Traditionally, this particular pasta was made of the leftover flours from all the wheat milled that day," he says.

Although the busiate-making seems time-consuming, we soon have a formidable collection of fresh noodles waiting to be cooked and eaten.

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"This is a very special kind of pasta that's only eaten on feast days, so you would have it just before Lent with a ragu of goat, or preserved tomatoes," Hardy says. "In Sicily, you have busiate with tomato and eggplant. Generally it's eaten alla norma—with capers, tomatoes, and anchovies."

Though we're short on capers and anchovies, we have our eggplant and tomato sauce ready to go.

Finally, we're rewarded with a hot plate of tender, spiraly noodles; smoky eggplant; crushed tomatoes and their juices; and a generous sprinkle of shaved smoked ricotta.

RECIPE: Busiate alla Norma

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We may not have been able to jet off to Sicily with Hardy a few days later, but eating this dish was definitely the next best thing.