Flour + Water: Pasta PDF
Preview Flour + Water: Pasta
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
Description:The list of books you might like
