Even with all the cool places we’ve been visiting lately, we’ve still been setting aside time to continue with our quest to make lots of interesting homemade pastas. Last week we decided to fire up our pasta extruder and try a shape we hadn’t done before: small macaroni (we previously made large macaroni with a nice white wine sauce). Macaroni is a pretty simple and common shape, so we thought we should pair it with a easy sauce – but one that stands out. Luckily, on our trip to Italy earlier this year we came home with a jar of truffle sauce, and we’d been wondering what we should do with it. Here it made for an quick and interesting sauce with these macaroni, so we’ll share our pasta here.
You’ll need:
- Semolina flour
- Olive oil
- A 90-gram jar of black truffle paste (we got ours from Casa Emma Winery)
- An 8-ounce package of oyster mushrooms
- Heavy cream
- Parmesan cheese
First, you’ll want to make your macaroni by following the first two steps here, except set the small macaroni die on your extruder and run your stand mixer at a 6 speed while you’re making the pasta. You’ll also want to cut off the macaroni when they are about 1 1/2 inches long, and then lay them out on some parchment paper dusted with more semolina, without letting them overlap. The macaroni will need to dry for at least 3 hours.
When you’re ready to cook your pasta, bring a pot of heavily salted water to a boil, then add in your macaroni to cook for around 5 minutes. Meanwhile, slice your mushrooms into bite-sized pieces and cook with 2 tablespoons of olive oil over medium-high heat for around 5 minutes, until they’re tender.
Once you’ve drained your pasta, place it back in the pot you cooked it in. Add in a tablespoon of olive oil, 3/4 cup of heavy cream, and around half your jar of truffle paste. Grate up 1/3 cup of Parmesan, then stir that in with everything else and mix together until you have a sauce that coats the macaroni well. Finally, add in the mushrooms to the pasta. Now you can dish up servings of your macaroni, topped with a little extra Parmesan.
Once you make this pasta, it’s a pretty simple recipe – the hardest part is finding a good truffle sauce, and then it’s just a matter of cooking the macaroni and your mushrooms and then stirring everything together into a sauce. Black truffle paste is an affordable way to begin cooking with truffles, and here the mushrooms add in to the truffle flavor and pair well with a simple cream and Parmesan cheese sauce. We enjoyed cooking with some of the ingredients we brought back from Italy, and we still have half a jar of truffle paste left so we’ll come up with a good way to put it to use and be sure to share it here.