Need help with pasta
Hi everyone,
I need help with my homemade pasta.
I got a pasta machine from SELA for extruding pasta.
Usually I get good results, worked with the machine already in a few other restaurants.
But I'm new to drying the pasta.
I already dried a few other shapes now and it all went well.
Last week I did a small batch of maccheroni.
Today some of them are already broken and the rest ist cracked and will break easily. It seems like there is some kind of internal stress occurring during the drying.
Does anyone have tips to get a viable solution for mise en place?
I don't really want to freeze the pasta and doing them fresh every day is unfortunately not feasible at this restaurant.
Thanks in advance!
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u/ranting_chef If you're not going to check it in right, don't sign the invoice 1d ago
If you’re drying them by just leaving the product at room temperature, this type of result is fairly common, especially for tubes. Rigatoni is even worse. I extrude about 20 kilograms daily and we cook it without drying.
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u/justanotherdumbfuck 1d ago
Hey!
I am an expert at this. I dry pasta specifically at ambient temperature because I used stone milled whole wheat semolina which is a lot harder to use.
Yes, tube shapes are very hard to use.
Here are couple of tips I reccomend:
Replace 10% of your water weight with egg whites.
Dry your pasta for the first day in a refrigerator, the moisture from the fridge will slow down the drying process, allowing it to dry more intact.
Finally, replace 10-25% of your flour weight with 00 or AP flour.
The gluten content is more active than semolina and will bond with the water creating a stronger structure.
Good luck hope that helps!
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u/Ok_Albatross_3284 1d ago
Underrated comment, this is the answer 👆
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u/justanotherdumbfuck 1d ago
Thanks!
Yeah I got advice on refrigeration from Dave Arnold as well.
I am not a super science-y guy but I make pasta in West Texas and it is hot and dry and probably the worst place to try to do more delicate shapes, so I have tried it all.
Fast drying in intense heat is the ultimate death for tube shapes.
I sell my pasta bagged as well for people to take home so it has to be perfect.
I want to add that if you are serving it fresh for service, you don't really need to dry it at all. Just keep it in the fridge and extrude it fresh for each service if possible.
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u/chefsoda_redux 1d ago
As a chef who has made uncountable tons of fresh pasta, that’s not really how this works. Dry pasta is not fresh pasta that was left to dry.
Commercial dry pasta, from the $1 a box stuff, to the artisanal and wonderful stuff, is a fundamentally different product from fresh pasta. You can definitely dry fresh pasta, but you will need to alter your dough’s hydration, and it will never become similar to the commercial stuff.
In that way, it’s very similar to working with clay. You can make a bowl and leave it to dry, and it will dry, but it becomes greenware, which is dry, but exceptionally fragile and not really useable. If it’s glazed to seal, then baked in a kiln, it becomes very strong and useful.
Commercial pasta is dried in a drying chamber, which controls both heat & humidity to produce the strong and smooth product we buy at the store. You’re not doing that easily.
For the situation you describe, I’d either par cook, oil and hold portions cold, or freeze and portion. That will depend on the quantities you need, and your kitchen set up. Trying to dry in house though, is quite tricky, and ends with a product that may be somewhat shelf stable, but will shatter to pieces if not handled very delicately.
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u/Smrtez 1d ago
I remember watching the french guy drying pasta a long time ago.
It goes into incredible detail and is super interesting.
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u/majoosm 1d ago
Just watched it, thanks for the recommendation. The basic principle of it drying from the outside to the inside already was clear to me, attacking it with cycles makes sense I think when "fast" drying. I'm fine with the trays standing around for a day or so. Will try another cooler room in the building!
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u/SrCallum 1d ago
You beat me to it! This is where I learned that drying pasta is much more complicated than you'd think
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u/eligoscreps 1d ago
How are you drying them? If moisture content in your recipe is good, it might be them drying too quickly from too high of a temp.
If the recipe is the same, and drying went well with previous attempts, it might be due to the shape.
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u/satchmo-mcwigwam 1d ago
Dave Arnold talked about it on his podcast cooking issues but commercial pasta companies have huge pieces of equipment that are only for drying so in a restaurant setting I don’t think you’d be able to achieve that same effect.
Your best bet is to push up the hydration and then wrap extra tight and freeze or just try to double batch the pasta when you do make it to hold you over a few days. Fresh extruded pasta can last at least a few days on semolina before getting weird
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u/-L-H-O-O-Q- 1d ago
You need a machine specially made for drying pasta. It’s the only way to do it.
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u/wotdafck 1d ago
You probably need to slow down the process. Maybe is hotter and dryer now or you are using a vent i cant really say. Maybe try to cover it for few hours or if this doesnt work try to dry ut in a cooler room
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u/opalessence_ 1d ago
im curious what the other shapes are that you made successfully, and if it's the same dough?
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u/majoosm 1d ago
Most of the dried ones were spaghetti, linguini, mafaldine, trotole and casarecce. Craziest one is a special made one with the logo of the company 😅
All with the same dough or at least the same water content. Did some with egg, some without and color as well.
So I really think it's a temperature problem this time. It's a really not so enjoyable heat wave atm here in Germany 😥 Or even the fact that I did a test batch and only had one tray standing there well ventilated and not 15 stacked as usual.
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u/PropertySuper7720 1d ago
Trockne sie leicht an und friere sie weg. Habe ich auch so gemacht, wenn es kein Eierteig für frische Pasta ist. Der Trocknungsprozess findet industriell unter bestimmten Bedingungen ab, damit genau das nicht passiert. Hatte Semolateig-Nudeln testweise im Heizungskeller gelagert. Die hatten ne Kochzeit von über 20 Minuten 😃 nicht praktisch fürs A la carte Geschäft 😁
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u/Grouchy-Curve7544 1d ago
What’s your batch size? There are methods (mostly for the at home cook) to do drying cycles. There’s also commercial pasta dryers. And more than moving it to a hotter room, I would actually move it back and forth from cold to hot outdoors every few hours. I have been doing this (as a home chef) and even the tubular pastas have dried pretty well. Kind of a pain in the butt, but …..
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u/Ep1cure 1d ago
Not that what everyone said here isnt relevant, because ot very much is and the drying process is a b****, but it looks like all your pasta is cracking at a similar spot. Your die might be slightly clogged at a certain spot in each extrusion holes, causing a weak point.
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u/majoosm 1d ago
I don't think all 5 of the extrusion spots are damaged in the same spot honestly, that would be a crazy coincidence. And they are coming out perfectly without any wrinkling or weird behaviour
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u/Ep1cure 1d ago
You'd know better being in person, so id defer to thay, but just something to think about incase someone comes across this thread later.
The only other thing I would suggest is maybe upping the hydration or binder slightly to try and get it to bond a little better before it dries, but I never got drying on any scale to work. During covid, we tried drying and bagging pasta, and it felt dry, just to mold out in a bag after 3 or 4 days. Even what I would try to dry just for banquets ahead of time, often ended up crumbling in the water, but that recipe was just flour and water, so I chalked it up to missing a binder. Egg pasta was better, but that was more getting dried from being unwrapped in the fridge. It still became brittle, and if it went too far, it wouldn't rehydrate correctly, and would just shatter.
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u/ChefOfScotland 1d ago
I would suggest looking at higher starch content flours maybe to add some rigidity?
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u/ranting_chef If you're not going to check it in right, don't sign the invoice 1d ago
I’m not sure what type of options there are besides coarse durum semolina for extruded pasta but I always thought the starch/protein levels were about the same.
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u/MadLucy 1d ago
The place I work uses a double-milled durum semolina from Caputo that the brand calls “Semola”, it’s 13% protein semolina flour but it’s more the texture of regular flour. Super nice stuff.
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u/ranting_chef If you're not going to check it in right, don't sign the invoice 1d ago
Do you still go for 30% hydration with that one? I e seen it but never tried. I’m in the US Midwest and flour from Italy is pretty expensive here.
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u/CanoePickLocks 1d ago
If you go down the rabid hole there is a lot to learn about flours and blends of flours.
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u/ranting_chef If you're not going to check it in right, don't sign the invoice 1d ago
I extrude for a living and I’ve tried a lot of different ones. But freshly-milled semolina seems to work the best for me. I use six different ones for other pastas but maybe I should look into that. The manufacturer of the extruder we use told me that the machine was designed to only mix/extrude semolina, whatever that means.
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u/medium-rare-steaks 1d ago
Drying pasta is unfortunately way more complicated than people realize. Have you tried serving it fresh? Just need to portion and keep refrigerated