Striped Pasta

This pasta is inspired by the striped rainbow pasta that is sold at the Village Market located in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, which is displayed to the right.

However I decided to only make two colors, since this is my first attempt. The basic technique is to squish together multicolored ropes into pasta sheets and then cut them. I played around with a couple variations of this technique and came up with the following. The pasta dough recipe is available at http://loxstockandbarrel.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-to-make-pasta.html. The white pasta is a plain pasta. The orange pasta is colored/flavored with 2 Tbsp paprika. I worked in small batches so that the dough did not dry out--I cut off small pieces of dough and made them into the final pasta shape, repeating until all of the dough was used up.



I rolled out the white & orange doughs to setting 5 and cut it with the small spaghetti cutter; I choose this setting because it is thin, yet thick enough that the strands can be squished together and I have time to lay out the stripes before the dough dries.



I interleaved each spaghetti color by hand, working quickly so that the strands did not dry out. However, this method was very time consuming; next time I think I will try a stacking multiple pasta sheets together, slicing them perpendiculally with a mandolin, and then rolling them out. I need to buy a mandolin so I can try this out.



Then I pressed it together, using water to help with the adhesion if necessary.



I rolled out the striped pasta sheet to setting 8 (the thinnest possible).




I hand cut pasta noodles using pastry cutter to get frilled edges; I cut them into fairly wide noodles so that the stripes are visible. More information about hand cut pasta can be found at http://loxstockandbarrel.blogspot.com/2007/01/hand-cut-pasta.html.



Then I twisted them like bread sticks to make the dried pasta look more interesting and dried them overnight.




Here are a few of the broken pieces that I boiled up to see how they look and taste. It kind of looks like bacon, doesn't it? Perhaps these should be served with a sauce that contains bacon or prosciutto. Or maybe I could wrap them around something that is usually wrapped by bacon or prosciutto. Any suggestions?