Last week we shared our first venture with extruded pasta, where we made some bucatini. This week we’ll share the second shape we tackled with our new pasta attachment: these large macaroni. With their size, thickness and texture, we thought they looked kind of like ziti, so we decided to cook them up like you would any kind of hearty pasta noodle. And since we’ve been slowly buying up bottles of wine from all the different wineries we visit, having white wine on hand led us to thinking that we should use some of it to make a sauce for our pasta. So we came up with this recipe, pairing some vegetables, pine nuts and a nice cheese with our sauce and macaroni, and we’ll show you how we made it.
You’ll need:
- Semolina flour
- Butter
- Olive oil
- Garlic
- A red onion
- 20 ounces of any small mushrooms
- A yellow bell pepper
- White wine
- Pine nuts
- Oregano
- Ricotta salata
First, to make your macaroni, follow the first two steps here for extruded pastas. Make sure you attach the large macaroni die to your extruder, and cut each piece of pasta when they’re 2 inches long. Then you’ll want to let the macaroni dry for 3 hours.
When you’re just about ready to cook your pasta, start slicing up your mushrooms, cut your onion into thin slices, and chop your garlic. In a large skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons of olive oil over medium-low heat and add in the mushrooms, cooking for around 5 to 10 minutes until they begin to brown, then place in the garlic and onion to cook for another 5 minutes or so.
Slice your yellow pepper and add that in, then pour in 1/2 cup of white wine and turn the heat to low, letting everything simmer for 10 minutes until the wine is mostly absorbed by the vegetables. Then add in a large handful of oregano leaves.
Meanwhile, boil the pasta in heavily salted water for 3 to 5 minutes, then use a spider strainer to transfer it to the pan with the vegetables. Gently mix everything together, then take the pan off the heat. Measure out 1/3 cup of pine nuts into a small, dry skillet and toast those over medium heat for about 3 minutes, just until they brown, and stir those in as well. Finally, grate up some ricotta salata and toss on top before mixing in.
Now you can plate up servings of macaroni, topped with more ricotta salata and oregano leaves.
We know macaroni isn’t the most exciting of all the pastas out there – it’s what you usually associate with Kraft fluorescent cheese powder. But in fact, macaroni dates back to at least the 14th century, so when you eat it in any form – including this recipe – you’re dining on some culinary history. In any case, whatever your feelings are on macaroni we think this recipe elevates the pasta since we’ve brought in several different vegetables, plus pine nuts and ricotta salata, to make for an interesting and tasty dish. In a little while we’ll also try our hand at the small macaroni that our extruder can make, so look out for what we decide to do with that shape!