Flour + Water: Pasta

436 Pages·2014·15.75 MB·English

by  Thomas McNaughton

Copyright © 2014 by Thomas McNaughton Photographs copyright © 2014 by Eric Wolfinger
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com
Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McNaughton, Thomas.
Flour + water : pasta / Thomas McNaughton.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-60774-470-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-60774471-9 (ebook)
1. Cooking (Pasta) I. Title. II. Title: Pasta. III. Title: Flour and water.
TX809.M17M43 2014
641.82’2—dc23
2014015936
v3.1

CONTENTS
Preface: The Origins
Preface: The Story Continues
Introduction
PART ONE THE DOUGH
How to Make Pasta Dough
Egg Dough
Hand-Rolled Semolina Dough
Extruded Pasta Dough
How to Cook the Pasta
How to Use These Recipes
PART TWO THE RECIPES
Summer
Autumn
Winter
Spring
Sources
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Index
PREFACE: THE ORIGINS
David Steele and David White
I wrote the original one-page business plan for Flour + Water on the back of an
envelope, over a decade before the restaurant actually became a reality. It
started with a simple premise: In Italy, I saw how pasta was used as a delivery
agent for seasonal ingredients; pizza took the same approach. Coming from the
East Coast of the United States, where pasta sauces and menus stayed the
same 365 days a year, this was an eye-opening experience for me. —David
Steele
I grew up in Ireland, in a village of sixteen hundred people. It was your classic
small town in the Irish countryside: It had a couple of churches, a town square,
one dentist, two lawyers, two doctors, and ten pubs. When we had a full house,
there were eight people at the dinner table: Mum and Dad and six of us siblings.
Dining together was a part of our life, mostly because our father insisted that we
come together at the table every day. My mother is a great cook, and our meals
were always wholesome and delicious. There were always potatoes, and
sometimes multiple potato dishes at once—everything that you’d expect from a
rural Irish family. —David White
I grew up in New Jersey, coincidentally about fifteen miles from where Tom
was raised. I put myself through college by working in restaurants. I started as a
dishwasher at the age of sixteen and worked my way up to a prep cook. The
higher up the ladder I got, the more quickly I realized that kitchen life is a very
tough life. At the same time, I saw servers in the front of house working fewer
hours and making more money. So I did the logical thing and moved out of the
kitchen. I became a busboy, and by age eighteen I was managing an Italian
restaurant in Wildwood, New Jersey.
I went to college not very far from my Jersey roots, at Temple University in
Philadelphia. During that period, I waited tables at some of the best restaurants
Philadelphia. During that period, I waited tables at some of the best restaurants
in the city. Most of those that know me have no idea, but I came inches from
dropping out of college to go to culinary school. My dad talked me out of that
plan. Instead, I graduated from college and went straight to Wall Street, still
continuing to wait tables on the weekends. In all, I spent about eight years
straight doing hard-core restaurant work.
I loved the restaurant industry but was shocked how most of the restaurants I
worked at weren’t run like real businesses. There was no awareness of food
costs or labor costs, and most strikingly, there was no overarching strategy.
Most restaurants I witnessed—including some very good ones—just planned on
figuring it out as they went along. Eventually, with a little more seniority on
Wall Street, I stopped waiting tables on the side. I vowed to return to the
restaurant business and do it my way.
I spent my teenage years with the Jesuits at a boarding school, where they fed me
big fat wedges of ham, the fat cap still unshaven, firm and bristly. Then I went to
college in Dublin, intermittently working toward a liberal arts degree in history
and Greek and Roman civilization. My rationale at the time, as a reluctant
student, was that I might as well study something interesting that would lure me to
a lecture here and there. By the time I graduated, I was itching to leave Ireland.
Still naive and idealistic, I had the travel bug, bad. I wanted to see the world.
To travel, I would need employment. I figured that if I could wait tables, I would
be able to work anywhere. And that’s how I started in this business. Out of
school, I got a job in a semi-decent restaurant in the heart of Dublin. It was
named Gotham Cafe. As fate would have it, its specialty was pizza and pasta.
I ended up in the States kind of by accident. One day my older brother told me he
was going to apply for one of the U.S. visas advertised in the paper. I asked him
to put one in for me while he was at it. He did. I was chosen in the lottery, and he
was not.
I had connections in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. New York?
I didn’t want to go there. I was already burning the candle at both ends in Dublin.
I needed to mellow out and figured New York would probably be a bad idea.
Boston? Back then, I thought of Boston as a place with too much of a connection
to Ireland; I wanted something different. And Chicago? I remember reading
about a car that froze in a street at fourteen degrees below zero or something like