A few weeks ago we shared our first foray into homemade pasta, and this week we’re showcasing our second attempt to make pasta entirely from scratch! This time we crafted some malloreddus, a textured shell-shaped pasta that originated on the island of Sardinia. We decided to pair it with a sauce we’d never tried before: a walnut sauce that comes from the region of Liguria, in northwestern Italy. It’s a creamy, slightly nutty-tasting alternative to more common white sauces like alfredo, and while you might not think to make nuts into a sauce, it was actually pretty good. We enjoyed making this fun pasta and cooking up a new sauce, and we’ll show you how we made this from start to finish.
You’ll need:
- 00 flour
- 2 dozen eggs
- Semolina flour
- Walnuts
- Milk
- 2 slices of country bread
- Garlic
- Pine nuts
- Parmesan cheese
- Olive oil
- Marjoram
For the malloreddus, you’ll want to first follow the first three steps here to make the pasta dough. Once your dough is done resting, cut it into four equal pieces and work with one piece at a time, keeping the rest covered in plastic wrap until you get to them. Use your hands to roll each piece into ropes that are 1/2-inch in diameter throughout their entire length. To make sure you’re rolling each rope out to an even width all the way down, press the tips of your fingers gently into the middle of the rope and then move them slowly outward as you’re rolling. When a roll is thin enough, cut it into 3/4-inch long pieces.
Then take a large fork and smush individual pieces into the times. Press the bottom of each piece deeper into the fork so the top begins to curl up, then roll this into a shell.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and dust with semolina flour, then place the malloreddus onto the sheet in a single layer. Repeat this process until you’ve shaped all your pasta dough, and remember that if you’re not going to cook the pasta right away, you should cover the sheet in plastic wrap and refrigerate it.
When you’re ready to make the sauce, measure a heaping 3/4 cup of walnuts into a small saucepan, cover in water, then bring to a boil and let cook for 4 minutes before draining the walnuts and patting them dry. You’ll also want to take your two bread slices, and if they’re fresh place them in a toaster for a minute or two (if they’re a day old or starting to get stale, they’re perfect as they are). Tear the bread into bite-sized pieces and place them into a bowl, then cover them with a cup of milk. Push the bread down into the milk, then pick each piece up one by one, squeeze as much milk as possible back into the bowl, and put the bread into a food processor. Add in the walnuts and 2 or 3 garlic cloves and blend together. Grate up about 1/4 cup of Parmesan and add that in, plus 2 tablespoons of pine nuts and some salt and blend again. Finally, add in the milk and 5 tablespoons of olive oil and blend until you have a thick sauce.
Now boil your malloreddus for 4 or 5 minutes, until they’re tender but not soft. Right before you drain the pasta, scoop out 1/2 cup of the cooking water. When the pasta is drained, mix with the walnut sauce plus half of your saved cooking water – if the sauce is too thick, gradually add in more water until you have a smooth and creamy sauce that coats each noodle.
Chop up a few extra walnuts and scatter on top, along with marjoram leaves, and now you can enjoy your malloreddus!
Malloreddus are apparently one of the easier pasta shapes to make by hand, so this is a good entry-level noodle if you’re trying to craft homemade pasta for the first time. And it pairs well with the walnut sauce, which is creamy without being overbearing and takes well to this rolled and ridged pasta. We’re glad we did some research and found a new pasta sauce to try, and we really did have fun standing in our kitchen, forks in hand, making a whole tray of malloreddus. We hope we inspire you to try some homemade pasta, and we’ll be featuring more cool shapes later this year!