Rolling in the Dough

29 days left in New York City and then I’m out of here… It’s off to the Caribbean or Florida although I’m not sure where exactly. We’ll see which way the wind blows…

I’ve given up my apartment and am leaving New York once and for all – not an easy task given that I have lots of friends and family here and New York has this way of roping me back in. I’ve been trying to leave for five years now! But those Caribbean waters are calling my name. A fellow yachty and I have been talking about sharing an apartment down in St. Martin for the season and I’m also considering getting a place in either Miami or Fort Lauderdale. Either way, I’ll be heading down to FL in a few weeks time to meet with some crew agencies and friends that have arrived from the Mediterranean. I’ve sent out my cv to crew agencies, emailed crew friends and looking to jump on a boat sometime in November. The Caribbean season doesn’t really get going until mid-December, but there should be plenty of work doing deliveries from the Med and the US down to the Caribbean.

As of November 1, I no longer have a place to live! AH! This should scare me, but it doesn’t. To some, it would seem inconceivable to give up an apartment and have no place to “live”, throwing caution to the wind and just taking off. But I feel free, and for me, that’s just how life works out best. Whenever I try to plan too much is when things start to go awry. I function much better just jumping in, and after last season on the yachts, I have a pretty good idea of what to expect, where to go and what the challenges will be. I can’t wait to be on the water again and feel the wind in my face. I feel totally optimistic about the coming season…

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping myself entertained by interloping in friends kitchens around New York. I spent the day today at the restaurant Barolo on West Broadway, learning to make fresh pasta! I went in this morning and met up with my friend, Maurizio, the chef – a bald-headed, overly caffeinated, Vespa riding Italian from Genoa. We met over a lengthy conversation at his bar the other night about chestnuts, as friends and I waited for a table for dinner. I’m preparing for an Iron Chef Chestnut cook-off at a friends farm in just a few weeks and pasta has been on my mind. So, I saw the chef and figured who better to talk to… We talked about savory chestnut cakes, chestnuts and game, and then he brought out some freshly prepared chestnut pasta to taste. After a great dinner (I had the cocoa pasta with wild mushrooms) and a ’78 Barolo, I decided to hit him up to let me hang out in his kitchen and learn to make pasta.

Maurizio put me in the capable hands of his master pasta maker, Manny. Expecting to walk into a hectic and chaotic environment, lots of bustling around, Manny perhaps being too busy to really show me his magic, I was pleasantly surprised that the kitchen was the exact opposite of what I'd anticipated. It was calm and sane as I walked downstairs into the prep kitchen; Mexican radio piping out of a flour dusted boom box, the butcher hand mincing lamb for a lamb ragout, another prep cook picking basil leaves and coring tomatoes. Something about Mexican music and foreign languages being spoken around me always makes me nostalgic for my time in restaurant kitchens…

Manny, a soft spoken and friendly Salvadoran, has been the resident pasta maker at Barolo for eight years and also moonlights as a pasta maker for other restaurants around the city. We started out the morning making 24 lbs. of pasta dough with eggs and durum flour; kneeding the dough in a giant mixer (you’d need Andre the Giant to kneed that amount of dough by hand!). He offered up the recipe: 18 lbs. of durum flour, 6 lbs. of a.p. flour, 50-something eggs. I declined writing it down, I don’t think I will ever be making that much pasta! Manny said he doesn’t need a recipe; he just goes by how it feels. And all along, as the dough was kneeding, Manny would grab a lump of dough and show me how the dough should feel – not too wet, not too dry, not too soft, not too hard. I fed a few pounds of dough at a time through a large pasta roller, which squished it out in thinner and thinner sheets - #3 for spaghetti, #1 for papparadell and ravioli.

We rolled and cut – busting out pounds of hand cut papparadell, linguini and spaghetti. Then we moved on to the ravioli making. Manny mixed up a batch of filling; ricotta, mascarpone, parmesan and lots of fresh herbs. After dusting them with semolina, he draped the ravioli molds with long, thin sheets of dough and showed me how to pipe in the filling. He worked like a machine, his dough was perfect, not a ripple out of place as he piped in the filling. Of course, when it was my turn to start piping, my raviolis really stood out – because each one was a different size! I didn’t quite have the trained precision that this pasta master had…

He said it was a slow day for him, not a lot to make (besides the 24 lbs. we’d just busted out), so we toured the walk-ins and he pointed out the black farfalle he’d made with squid ink, the chestnut linguini made with chestnut and chickpea flour, the cocoa pasta, apple and cheese filled ravioli’s, etc. Then, of course, it came time to sample and the chef set me up with a plate of apple and cheese filled ravioli’s with a lamb ragout. The ravioli’s were much lighter than expected and the lamb ragout was a delicious accompaniment to the mildly sweet filling.

On the way home, I stopped at the Buon Italia in the Chelsea Market and picked up chestnut, chickpea, durum and semolina flours to test out my new pasta making skills, and indoctrinate my new, hand-crank pasta machine…

Tomorrow I’ll be hanging with pastry chef Surbhi Sahni at the Indian restaurant Devi, on 18^th Street in Manhattan, picking up some new tricks to bring to the Caribbean with me…

Ahhh, life is good.