goat’s cheese

Homemade Pasta

Cooking, Recipes

The latest #AskMim request comes from Elaine, hello Elaine! She wanted to know how to make fresh pasta and a good recipe for goat’s cheese & watercress tortellini…no problemo!

fresh pasta

Some of my favourite recipes are so neat, and once they’re in your head they stick there forever, always ready when you need them.

tagliatelle

Fresh pasta is just such a recipe, once you know the formula – it’s with you forever and you can play around with it all you like.

1 large egg + 100g pasta flour = 1 portion of fresh pasta.

(Use grade ‘00’ / pasta flour if you can get it, if you can’t try strong white bread flour or ordinary plain flour.)

Method

1. Tip the flour into a large mixing bowl, make a well in the centre and add the egg. Using fork beat the egg into the flour then pop the fork down and get stuck in with your hands. Knead it really well for about 5 minutes until it’s smooth and elastic.

2. Wrap the ball of dough up in cling film and leave it in the fridge. It will keep happily in there for about half a day, any more than that and the dough tends to oxidise and you get a grey tinge to the outside which looks a bit dodge.

3. If you want to serve the pasta with something slow cooked like a rich tomato sauce or a ragu, now is the time to get cracking on that.

4. To shape the pasta, press it gently with your hands so it’s like a pitta bread and rub it with a dusting of flour. Set your pasta rollers to the thickest setting on the machine. Run the pasta through twice, rub again with a little flour then switch it to the next setting down. Again run the dough through twice. Keep going, rolling and dusting with flour until you’ve been through all the settings, or until it’s the thickness you want. If you have one, add the cutting attachment for spaghetti or tagliatelle and run it through to cut it up. Alternatively, fold it into a concertina and slice it to get long ribbons of pappardelle or cut into squares with a knife, or circles with a cookie cutter, for tortellini and ravioli. If you don’t have a pasta machine, don’t fret. You can roll it out with a rolling pin (I usually do, I borrowed the pasta machine especially). Rolling it out by hand works fine, but it can be a bit heavy going, especially when you want to get it really thin. 

Homemade pasta

5. Pop some flour (or fine semolina) onto a work surface and toss the pasta ribbons in the flour so that they don’t clump together.

fresh tagliatelle

6. Bop it into a large pan of boiling water, (salted or fling in a glug of olive oil in there if you like) and cook for 4-5 mins or to your liking. Scoop the pasta out of the boiling water with a slotted spoon/pasta spoon, straight into a serving dish or into the pan with the sauce in. A splash of pasta water is good for thinning down a thick sauce that needs a little more movement. Serve straight away.

tortellini making

For the goat’s cheese tortellini

Ingredients

2 portions worth of fresh pasta, as above (rolled out into sheets and cut into squares approx. 7 – 8cm square)
100g soft goat’s cheese
1 clove of garlic, crushed
50g watercress, finely chopped
1 egg
1 tablespoon of pine nuts, crushed
3 tablespoons of finely grated parmesan
pinch ground nutmeg
salt & black pepper

Method

1. In a small saucepan mix all the ingredients together, then cook gently over a medium heat for about 5 minutes or until thickened, stirring all the time as if you were making scrambled eggs. Remove from the heat and allow to cool, then it’s ready to pop into the pasta.

cheese and watercress filling

2. Place 1/2 teaspoonfuls of the mixture into one corner of each pasta square. Fold the oposite corner over it to seal it in. You might want to use a little water or egg wash to seal it. Push the air out carefully then roll the triangle up twice (like when you roll a neckerchief in the scouts/guides). Turn the parcel over and fold the ends to the middle then to the back, pressing gently but firmly to make sure it’s sealed well.

Folding tortellini

3. When you’ve repeated the process with all of the pasta and the filling, drop them carefully into boiling water for 3-4 minutes or until they’re starting to bob merrily on the surface. Scoop out with a slotted spoon. I like to serve mine very simply with a little more finely grated parmesan and some salt and pepper.

Buon appetito!

x

Goat's cheese and watercress tortellini

If you would like me to write a recipe for you too or answer a burning kitchen conundrum please get in touch via facebook, instagram or twitter using the hashtag #askmim.

Happy Cooking and thanks Elaine for getting in touch. Hope you have fun making pasta. xx

Goat’s Cheese

Cooking, Food Heroes, Recipes

This is Joe.

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When I first met Joe I was in his living room wearing pyjamas with my mascara halfway down my face. I had been painting the town red the night before with his housemate – my good friend Helen, and had ended up staying the night on their sofa.

Luckily he didn’t hold this against me. About a week ago Helen mentioned Joe had started making goat’s cheese in his spare time! Urrrm…AMAZING!

So on Saturday I managed to convince Joe to let me watch him make his latest batch in exchange for a slice of cake, a coffee and the link to the YouTube video where Harrison Ford pierces Jimmy Fallon’s ear!

First thing on the list: Buy Goat’s Milk. Sounds easy, goat’s milk is everywhere right? Wrong. We needed full fat goat’s milk which turned out to be as difficult to find as forced rhubarb!*

Things we learned on our Full Fat Goat’s Milk Quest:

1) People who sell cheese don’t make the cheese or know where you can buy milk. But, there is a marvellous selection of French Cheeses on Broadway Market. Plus, the people on said cheese stall said that if we found a goat they’d be happy to look after it for us.

2) The staff at Hackney City Farm were very helpful. They told us that:
a) they don’t sell goat’s milk
b) even if they did it’s the wrong season because goats don’t produce milk till the spring when they’ve had their kids
c) their goats won’t be having kids because they have tried to breed already them but without success
d) fresh goat’s milk has lots of goat hair in it.
e) their first thought as to why we wanted goat’s milk was that we must need it to feed our own baby goats (this isn’t really a fact it was just quite funny)

3) We couldn’t find any goat’s milk in Spitalfields either…although there is a statue of a goat which we felt was misleading and was most definitely mocking us.

Spitalfields

4) There’s a company at Borough Market called “the greedy goat” and they sell goat’s milk icecream, but they don’t sell the milk. They also told us that Neal’s Yard Dairy doesn’t sell it either but asked us to ask them anyway to show them there’s a demand.

5) Neal’s Yard Dairy don’t sell goat’s milk, and it’s not the right time of year for it anyway (we knew both of these things already but it’s always good to get a second opinion)

6) Waitrose near the Barbican does sell full cream goat’s milk!!! SUCCESS!

Milk

Goat’s Cheese by Joe

1) Put 50ml of boiling water into a jug or other heatproof container.
When the water has cooled to room temperature add 1 teaspoon of citric acid, stir thoroughly until it dissolves.

2) Put 2 litres of whole (full cream) goat’s milk into a large saucepan.

3) Stir the milk with a large spoon and with a “lifting motion” mix in the citric acid.

Adding the citric acid

4) Gently heat the mixture to 83°C stirring occasionally so that the milk doesn’t catch and burn on the bottom of the pan

5) When it reaches the correct temperature take the pan off the heat and leave to stand for 30 minutes or until there are what look like yellowish cracks in the mixture.

Split milk

6) Line a colander with a double thickness of muslin cloth (which has been sterilised) and fit the colander over a large bowl or pan

7) Pour the milk mixture into the lined colander. This will allow the whey to drain out into the bowl below leaving only the cheese in the cloth.

Pouring Milk

8) Stir in some salt (and some herbs too if you like) then twist the corners of the cloth up together to encase the cheese and squeeze out more of the whey as you do so.

Tie up the cloth

9) Tie the corners together and hang the cheese up with a bowl below it to catch the drips, leave like this for 2 hours

10) Pop the finished cheese in the fridge overnight to firm up, and that’s it! Easy 🙂

Finished cheese

The resulting cheese is creamy, rich and had a very subtle goat’s cheese flavour which intensifies in cooking. As well as generally scoffing this delicious cheese I used it to make some snazzy little tarts:

Goats cheese tarts

Goat’s Cheese & Red Onion Tarts: Line a greased bun tin with rounds of puff pastry then fill them with a mixture of fried red onions and onion chutney (or onion jam). Top with small pieces of soft goat’s cheese and a sprig of thyme.
Bake in the oven at 190°C for around 15 minutes.

As well as a pretty decent quantity of cheese you will notice that quite a large amount of whey is also produced. Joe said that from his research the main uses for excess whey were beauty related, and that some people even take baths in it! None of our housemates seemed keen on soaking themselves in thin goaty milky liquid but everyone munched the whey based soda bread I hurled together, which I jazzed up with some black onion seeds and fresh thyme.

Soda Bread

I’m still swimming in whey (not literally), so this morning I made pancakes with it too.

whey pancakes with syrup, cheese and pomegranate

Whey Pancakes: Mix 1 cup of plain flour with an egg and whisk thoroughly. Gradually add 1 cup of whey and whisk until smooth. Stir in a teaspoon of caster sugar and 1/2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda.
Use this batter to make small pancakes in a non-stick pan which has been greased with a little bit of vegetable oil. I served mine with some of the cheese, pomegranate seeds and maple syrup (although honey would be great too).

And finally. After all that, I STILL have some whey left, so I decided to test the theory that whey is super-fantastic for your skin by making a foot soak.

Whey & Lavender Foot Soak: In a pan I mixed 300ml of whey with 300ml of water. Then I added 1 teaspoon of dried lavender flowers and 1 teaspoon of honey. I heated the mixture gently until the honey had dissolved but the mixture wasn’t yet simmering. I then passed the mixture through a sieve to catch all the Lavender flowers and popped it into a large bowl ready for my toes.
Once it had cooled enough to touch I popped in my feet. The bowl wasn’t quite big enough (should’ve checked this really) but it did the job. I left my feet to soak until the liquid cooled down to room temperature and I got bored, but I must admit it felt pretty good. I don’t know of that’s the whey or just the fact it was nice warm water on my feet but either way I tried it and whey was used – huzzah!

*in my last blog post about crumble I struggled to find rhubarb, since then it seems to be everywhere. So I bought some, simmered it in water with some juniper, star anise, slices of oranges and lemons and then sweetened it with a dash of honey. When soft I scooped out the rhubarb and served it with some smoked mackerel and a few rocket leaves dressed with lemon juice and black pepper.
I then picked out the spices and citrus fruits from the simmering liquid and reduced it down to a (still quite thin) syrup. When cooled you can dilute this with fizzy water for a fancy rhubarb cordial! Whoop!

rhubarb and smoked mackerel