It’s past time for me to learn to make home-made pasta. I had the best possible teacher: Sara Jenkins, the chef/proprietor of Mediterranean restaurant Nina June in Rockport. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer)
After my friend Nancy Jenkins, a Camden native and a famous Italian cooking expert, read in the paper that I wanted to learn to make pasta, she reached out: “If you’re serious about making pasta, come take a lesson with Sara Jenkins,” she emailed me.
No need to ask twice!
Sara, who happens to be Nancy’s daughter, is also the chef/proprietor of Mediterranean restaurant Nina June in Rockport. Before that, she owned two highly regarded Italian restaurants in Manhattan. Adding to her Italian cred, Sara partly grew up in Italy, speaks the language fluently, and owns a family home in Tuscany with her mom and brother.
I’d mentioned my pasta ambitions in a story I wrote about a dozen items on my culinary bucket list, items which I intended to — hoped to, anyway — tackle in 2025. I’ve reached that age where the question I ask myself about almost everything almost every day is, what are you waiting for?
As we made the arrangements, Sara laughingly referred to herself as “the pasta queen.” That same week, I excavated my pasta machine from the basement where it had been languishing. Its model name? “Pasta Queen.” I’d bought the machine for a few dollars at a yard sale just as everyone in America was shedding pasta machines, some 10 years after everyone in America was buying pasta machines. I’d used mine exactly once.
Sara arrived in my kitchen on a cold Tuesday morning with a pasta rolling pin, a pasta board, a back-up pasta machine – and her mother Nancy. As we set up, Nancy casually mentioned making porcini pasta for Julia Child! (And did a spot-on impression). Julia never liked Italian food, Sara said, quoting her: “It takes time and skill to cook a fine French meal. Anybody can cook a plate of pasta.”
Entertaining Julia wasn’t even the best part of Nancy’s story. Get this: She’d purchased the pasta from Al Capone. Okay, so it turned out to be another Al Capone, this one a man who used to run a pasta shop in Somerville, Massachusetts. (What were his parents thinking?)
Despite the lively conversation, I was anxious about my messy house, my mediocre canned tomatoes and my inadequate olive oil, as well as my general ignorance about making fresh pasta. After the first pass-through in the machine, the dough, while admittedly thick, looked pretty good to me. What if we stop here? I asked Sara. She’d wonder, she replied, “What bozo made the pasta?”
We ran the dough through the machine many more times, me ineptly, while Sara could have done it upside down with her hands tied behind her back. When the pasta was getting to be the length of an old-fashioned woolen muffler, and the floor was dusted in flour, we cut it into segments and guided it into the machine, which cut it into ribbons.
Lunchtime. Sara Jenkins serves pasta for her mother, food writer and cookbook author Nancy Jenkins, after making it at my house on a pasta machine I’d bought years earlier at a yard sale. Our lunch was so easygoing, I entirely forgot to serve the salad and the wine (but at least I remembered the chocolate cookies). (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer)
We ate our fresh tagliatelle with pomodoro sauce for lunch – blink, and the cooking is done. Our conversation drifted as we twisted the strands around our forks, touching on martial arts, American robins, home ownership, and machine-made versus hand-made pasta. The pasta had chewiness and bounce, the tomatoes were more sheen than sauce. Sara said she’d renewed her acquaintance with tagliatelle with pomodoro when her son was born. He’s in high school now.
“The one thing that I was really insistent that my child eat was pasta with tomato sauce, because when we go to Italy you have to eat pasta at a restaurant. It’s not like America where you can get chicken fingers and stuff like that,” she said. “Children love pasta with tomato sauce — it’s not a hard sell.
“In making it for him, and making it so many times, I found my way back to it,” she continued. “To me, it’s so elemental. In some ways, it is the foundation of Italian food. I still to this day don’t think there is anything better to eat than pasta pomodoro.”
We piled the fresh tagliatelle in small mounds and let it dry for half an hour before cooking it in boiling, heavily salted water. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer)
Basic Pasta Fresca Dough
This recipe is from “The Four Seasons of Pasta” by Nancy Harmon Jenkins and Sara Jenkins. To roll out by hand or in a pasta rolling machine, the Jenkinses prefer to use unbleached all-purpose flour because the Italian 00 flour available in North America is often old and stale. “This makes quite a wet, soft dough, but it makes exceptionally tender and delicate pasta,” they write.
Makes 1¼ to 1½ pounds of pasta dough (enough for 6 servings of pasta)
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
3 large eggs
½ cup water (room temperature)
2 tablespoons olive oil
Pinch sea salt (optional)
Mound the flour on a wooden board, make a well in the center and drop the eggs into the well. Using a fork, gently break up the eggs a little, then add about ¾ of the water and start to incorporate the flour, using the fork to slowly draw it in from the inner walls of the well, being careful not to let the eggy liquid break through the flour wall and deluge the board. (Note that some cooks find it easier to mound the flour and start mixing the eggs in a large mixing bowl to keep the liquid from leaking out. When the dough begins to thicken and come together, turn it out on the board.)
As the dough begins to thicken, switch to a bench scraper and lift and fold over the dough, incorporating more and more of the flour, a little at a time, until you have a dough that is easy to knead. By the time you’ve incorporated about half the flour, you’ll be able to change your technique and knead the dough with your hands until it all comes together in a mass. If the dough seems too dry, sprinkle a few tablespoons of the remaining water over the dough. On the other hand, if it seems too wet, add a sprinkle of flour and knead it in. Knead for 5 minutes or so, until you have a smooth, compact dough, then rub the outside with the olive oil, gently kneading it into the outside of the dough mass.
Wrap the dough tightly in plastic wrap and set it aside for at least 30 minutes, or refrigerated if overnight (but bring it back to room temperature before rolling it again).
If you are using a pasta machine to make tagliolini, fettucine, or similar kinds of pasta (basically noodles), dust your lump of dough with flour and begin rolling it out on the widest opening. Dust the sheet that comes out with flour and fold it lengthwise into thirds, making an even shape. Roll through on the widest setting at least three times in all, until you’re satisfied with the texture. Then start to roll it out for real, rolling and dusting with flour after each roll-through, reducing the setting size every couple of times. For tagliatelle, take it down to number 5, then put the sheet through the tagliatelle cutter, dust with a little flour, and curl the pasta into nests. Set the nests aside to dry for at least 30 minutes before cooking the pasta as usual in a large pot of abundantly salted water at a rolling boil.
How long should it cook? Fresh pasta like this is done when the noodles float to the top—in two or three minutes.
Summertime Sugo di Pomodoro (Fresh Tomato Sauce)
This recipe is from “The Four Seasons of Pasta” by Nancy Harmon Jenkins and Sara Jenkins. The sauce is also excellent as a topping for pizza — add mozzarella and slivered basil and you will have a classic pizza margherita. We used canned marazano tomatoes when we made the sauce in February, but fresh local tomatoes are here now, so take advantage.
Makes enough for 4 to 6 servings over pasta
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, very thinly sliced
2½ to 3 pounds ripe fresh tomatoes, preferably plum tomatoes, peeled, seeded if necessary, and coarsely chopped
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon sugar (optional)
Handful of basil leaves, slivered
Combine the butter and oil in a heavy saucepan and set over medium-low heat. When the butter has melted, add the garlic and cook slowly until the slices are almost melted in the oil. Do not let the garlic brown as it will give an acrid flavor to the sauce.
When the garlic is soft, add the tomatoes with any juices that have accumulated. Raise the heat slightly and cook rapidly so that the tomatoes give off a lot of their liquid. Stir in the salt and pepper to taste and add a little sugar if you wish. (Fresh tomatoes can vary enormously, from deeply acid to overwhelmingly sweet and all stages in between.) Continue cooking until the tomato pieces start to soften and fall apart, thickening into a sauce. Most of the liquid will have cooked down and you can start to crush the tomatoes further using a fork.
Taste the tomato sauce and adjust the seasoning. Serve the sauce as is, with chunks of tomato, or puree it coarsely, using an immersion blender, or puree it into a completely smooth sauce using a food processor or a vegetable mill.
Stir the basil in at the last minute before serving.
Variations:
Add or substitute other fresh herbs — parsley, lovage, chives; or dried herbs – oregano, cumin.
Puree the tomatoes completely and beat in ½ cup cream, then reheat.
Add one or more dried red chili pepper, crumbled.
When you have a good supply of fresh local ripe tomatoes, this very basic sauce can be made in quantities and put up in jars or frozen in pint containers to provide a resource for the winter kitchen.
Pasta comes out of the machine in a thick sheet. It still needs many more turns to reach the right thickness — or rather thinness. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer)
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Dining and Cooking