Last night, Greeley (in the photo above, cranking out fresh pasta) and I took Pasta From Scratch at the Culinary School of the Rockies.Girls night in the kitchen, no doubt!  Our class made five different pasta dishes, each one bringing a unique blend of flavors, filling, and shape.  The menu included fresh egg pasta, tomato sauce, spinach and pine nut ravioli with goat cheese, wild mushroom and garlic sauce, red pepper and pancetta sauce, and pumpkin tortelloni with brown butter and sage. 

Archaeological documentation shows that noodles were probably first made in central Asia around 1000BC.  Many cultures have some form of pasta in their native culture: Germans have spaetzle, the Polish have piegori, and throughout Orient there are all kinds of noodles usually made with rice or soy flour.

Italian pasta is probably the most diverse of all the noodle types.  The word pasta means “paste,” made by combining flour with a liquid-egg, milk, water or sometimes wine.  There are literally hundreds of sizes, shapes, and thickness of pasta. 

As a general rule, imported (from Italy) dried pasta is superior to American factory-made pasta, mainly because it is made only with semolina flour.  Semolina is made from durum wheat  and is coarsely grounded which prevents it from absorbing as much water as regular all-purpose wheat flour.  This absorption property allows the pasta to remain pleasantly firm when cooked to al dente.

In class, Greeley and I were assigned to the pumpkin tortelloni making team.  I was actually surprised by how easy it was to make and stuff the dough.  Our recipe called for an semolina egg flour, which gave the pasta a slightly dark yellow color.  As gourd season is hitting its prime, we used a pumpkin meat stuffing seasoned with panko breadcrumbs, chopped sage, nutmeg, brown sugar, honey, and Parmesan cheese.  Top that off with a brown butter and sage sauce, it was was hard not to indulge.