Carmen Quagliata’s passion is Italian food. Well, and the Yankees, but that’s another story. Like many parents in Verona, he shares the things that he cares about with his kids. Which is how we found him teaching his sons to make pasta one recent Sunday afternoon.
Quagliata, for those of you who haven’t met him yet, is the executive chef at Union Square Cafe in Manhattan. You’ll find a lot of handmade pasta on the menu there, like the broad noodles known as pappardelle and butternut squash tortelli. But the pasta he was teaching the kids to make was garganelli, a tubular shape.
You’ll need some pasta dough and a few pieces of equipment: a pasta machine to roll the dough thin, a pizza wheel to cut it, a 5/8″ dowel and a garganelli board, a wooden paddle that is sometimes called a gnocchi board. It is widely available on the Internet and will run you less than $10. By the way, Quagliata makes his pasta dough in the Cuisinart with regular, all-purpose flour.
The video below will show you the basic technique behind it all. Yes, it will take some time to make enough garganelli for the family. Enough to catch up on lots of player stats and schoolwork.
Home page photo by fugzu via Flickr.
