Homemade pasta in under 5 minutes – Cacio e Pepe

Two ingredient pasta dough in under 2 minutes, I have made this full dish in under 10 minutes after work before, it can be done!

Hot Water Gnocchi
Gnocchi
00 pasta flour
boiling water
enough of each to form a tight dough.
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Scale out flour into a large bowl. Boil your water. Add the water whilst piping hot to flour and stir to incorporate. Allow to hydrate and cool down for 2/3 minutes. Remove from the bowl and begin to work the dough until smooth and slightly elastic. Divide the dough into 4. Roll the dough section into a long strip and cut into equal thumbnail sizes balls. Using a gnocchi paddle or a grater, individually press the gnocchi on the board away from you. Store on a tray lined with semolina.

Cacio e Pepe – 2 servings
Hot water gnocchi (amount for 2 servings)
100g Parmesan, finely grated
100 g butter
2 tbsp black peppercorns, crushed (using a pan) or freshly ground with a peppermill
Salt for water, to taste
–
Blanch gnocchi – Cook the gnocchi in boiling, seasoned water for 2–3 minutes until they float. Reserve some of the starchy cooking water.
While the gnocchi cooks, crush the black peppercorns and lightly toast them in a dry sauté pan for 1–2 minutes to toast.
Ladle some of the reserved starchy water onto the toasted pepper. Add the hot gnocchi and reduce the water slightly around the gnocchi while tossing.
Remove from heat, emulsify in the butter, then gradually add Parmesan, tossing to create an emulsified sauce that coats the gnocchi.
Adjust seasoning with extra pepper if desired, and serve immediately finishing with freshly grated parmesan.

Okay, here’s the quickest, fastest, and cheapest pasta recipe you’ve never seen before. Okay, we’re going to start. This is so simple and so delicious. I do cook this all the time. Absolutely love it. We start with double zero flour. Doesn’t work without. Put an amount of it in there. No recipe for this. This guy. An amount of double zero pasta. Salted water. Little salt in there, too. Boiling water. Boiling water goes into the pasta flour. Boiling water goes into the pasta flour and gets mixed around to create a dough. A little bit more. Must be boiling water. Put the pasta water back on to boil. This is my answer to very cheap quick cookery, which I don’t do very often, especially not on here, but sometimes it’s quite nice just to show you something that we know about that you maybe don’t. You just bring that together as it cools down a little bit and it’s just about able to handle without burning me into pieces. And we bring that together as a dough. All right. So, remember that’s just water, boiling water, and double zero pasta and salt. All right. Now, we got to work that a little bit. Just work that like you would a kind of any kind of bread dough or pasta dough. Just bringing it back, working it in. Just getting that gluten working. You’ll see this thing come together as a dough. You could just make this and keep it in the fridge, but to be honest, it’s one of those things you kind of just want to lean into. You make it, you cook it, and you eat it. And it’s real simple and it’s quick. And that’s the magic and the beauty of the whole thing. So, really simple. You create this sort of glutenous little water flour based pasta like so. Lose that. Cut all this bit out, Sam, because it’s well boring, isn’t it? Right. That then comes together in a lovely dough like that. Now, just a little bit more of that flour on the board. And I got myself one of these, which is um basically what we use to shape the butter and little nokies and pasta dishes. So, just take some of this some of this dough, cut it into four strips like that. I’m just going to make one strip for the purpose of this, just so you can see it and understand it. Roll that out sausage style. Nice and thin like that. Nice and even. I’m not looking for anything neat. This is like quick Wednesday night home dinner. They’re not looking for anything particularly sophisticated. So, put that together. And then I’m just going to chop those into relatively even pieces. Got all my lovely pieces here. And then I’m just going to take one of these boards and just roll them down like that. Roll them down. I’m squeezing with my thumb, pushing with my thumb, and it rolls off like so. Rolling down, and they just roll off onto the pile of finished ones. Keep it flowered so they don’t stick. Remember, this is water and flour, nothing else. There’s basically going to be a really lovely vehicle for our sauce. And this can be made in under 10 minutes. I’ve done this start to scratch from cupboard to the plate in 10 minutes. utterly delicious. So, this is how you do it. You may remember that I also did a lovely video with the boys at Topjaw, lovely boys, and made ketchup pepper in my house and Jesse came to my house and made an absolute mess in my kitchen, which is really nice. I was going to do this dish um but then they ran out of time cuz they were too busy drinking beer. So, we just made normal katcha pepe with normal pasta. Um but it was a lot of fun. But this is ultimately my katcha pepe dish. the way I do it and I love it. So there’s the lovely pasta. Okay, there’s my pasta. There’s my boiling salted water. In it goes. This wants exactly two minutes. Wants to drop, float, cook for 1 minute. Out she comes. That’s your paws. Okay, so you see those noky have floated. Now all we do now is pass that off. And I’m just going to reserve that only because I want that pasta water. So pop that over there. In here is going to be our sauce. I take my mega pepper milk to make some kaca pepper sauce. Lots of lovely black pepper in there using my fantastic pepper milk. And let’s toast those off for a second. Get a little bit of toasty going on there. Really nice. You can smell that black pepper. Okay. Into there goes the pasta water. Plenty of that pasta water in there. Into that goes our pecorino cheese, but I’m not using pecorino. I’m using parmesan because I prefer it. Into there goes the parmesan cheese. Don’t come at me. Into there goes nice salted butter. That’s that emulsion you’re looking for. That double bite double emulsion. You’ll only get that because the all that lovely starch that’s in the pasta water. That’s what’s giving us this incredible emulsion. Right back in goes the noky. There you go. That is the quickest, fastest, cheapest pasta dish. I know.