Today's been a great day. A lazy Sunday where just about all I did was cook for the whole day. Crafting a breakfast. Devising a lunch. All the while, cogitating dinner. The result of this thought process has been a spinach and herb pasta with chicken marsala. Pasta has been around for a longer time than may be realized, with the first known references to it dating all the way back to 1154. It's such an old recipe and a major staple in Italian cooking that I felt it necessary to try and make it properly. The result? I'll never buy boxed pasta again. The texture is wonderful. Tender, completely free of graininess, and slightly chewy. As for the chicken marsala? I just needed something to put on top of this beautiful noodle I'd created.
What you need:
For the pasta:
About 0.3 pound spinach
About 0.15 pound cilantro
About 0.15 pound curly parsley
3 eggs
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
2.25 cups durum flour
1.5 cups semolina plus extra for dusting
For the chicken marsala:
4 chicken breasts
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
6 cremini mushrooms
1 small yellow onion
2-3 cloves of garlic, or 1 clove elephant garlic
4 oz. marsala cooking wine
16 oz. chicken stock
Start by making your pasta since it requires some rest for the gluten in the pasta flour to develop. Gather up your herbs, trim them and dry them.
Stuff the herbs and oil into a blender container and crack in your eggs.
Blend until fairly smooth. If you have trouble getting everything fed into the blades, stop the blender, use a dowel (I use it ALL THE TIME, go get one!) to push everything down, pulse, and repeat until you can blend it smoothly.
Mix your flours, leaving a well in the middle. If you're really good, you can do this without a bowl. I don't recommend that though, it's very difficult and I've made a mess doing it quite a few times.
Pour in about 3/4ths of your green mixture, mix it up with a dowel (or other mixing utensil), and work it a good deal. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes and knead it some more. If if seems sticky, add more flour. If it doesn't hold together well, add more of the green mixture. It should be a fairly stiff dough and kneading it should give you a great forearm workout.
When you finish mixing it, place it in a towel, wrap it up and place it in the freezer for at least 15 minutes. In the meantime, prep for the chicken marsala.
Mix the flour, salt and pepper in a small bowl.
Chop your onion, mushrooms and garlic. My brother sent me this AWESOME elephant garlic from California, so I only needed to use one clove. I didn't even end up using the whole thing in this recipe. As you can see in the picture, this garlic is preposterously large and amazing.
If it's been 20 minutes or more, take out your pasta dough and knead it a little more, then cut off a small chunk to work with.
I happen to have a pasta machine so I can roll it out that way, but if you don't and you still want to make pasta, roll it out on a very well floured cutting board to be very thin. I don't know exactly how thin my pasta is, but I'd estimate about a millimeter.
To roll out your dough with a machine, start on the widest setting and roll your dough through several times, folding it over again and again until you get a fairly square piece of dough. Sprinkle flour on the dough and put it through the next notch. If you want you can go through every other notch. My machine has thickness settings from 1-7, 1 being the widest and 7 the thinnest. I rolled out my square on one, moved to 2, floured the dough, moved to 4, floured, moved to 6, floured, moved to 7.
Once you have a bunch of dough rolled out, start cutting it. I used the fettuccine setting on my machine. You can also cut it by hand with a sharp knife on a cutting board. Once you finish cutting the fettuccine it shouldn't be sticking together, but you should still flour it to prevent the freshly cut edges (probably more moist than the floured face of the sheet) from sticking to each other. This is especially important for storing the pasta.
I got to cut about 2 sheets of pasta before moving on. I was really hungry and excited to taste my meal. I could always roll and cut the rest later, which is exactly what I ended up doing.
Put on a pot of water to boil and prep the chicken. Pound a breast to a uniform flatness with a flat faced meat mallet (the flat side is facing the other way in my picture, sorry about that). You don't want to use the side with the vicious looking teeth because they're mean. To clarify, they will tear up the chicken breast to the point that it starts falling apart.
Preheat a pan to medium high and place a small dab of butter in to coat the bottom of your pan. Dredge your chicken breast in your flour mixture.
Lay the chicken in the hot pan. You should hear light sizzling when you lay it down. Cook for 2-4 minutes, flip and cook another 2-4 minutes. Check the chicken constantly so as not to overcook it.
Once your chicken is finished, remove it to a side plate and salt your now boiling pot of water. Put a little more butter in the same pan from the chicken breast and toss in about a fourth of what you have of each, the onion, garlic, and mushrooms. Sauté them for 3-5 minutes, until the onions are golden and the mushrooms are golden on the edges. Then
Now add about an ounce of marsala, just enough to deglaze the pan.
Add about 4 ounces of chicken stock after the marsala and sprinkle in a pinch of the flour mix you used to dredge the chicken. Simmer until reduced by half.
While waiting for your sauce to reduce, cook some pasta in your boiling salt water. Fresh pasta cooks absurdly quick (1-2 minutes), so keep an eye on it. As soon as it starts floating, IMMEDIATELY pull it out. If you continue cooking it the proteins from the egg bind up more and more, making for a horrendously tough pasta.
Remove it to a plate, sprinkle a little bit of extra virgin olive oil on it and toss to coat.
Hopefully at this point your sauce has reduced enough. Return the chicken breast you had on the side plate to the sauce and spoon the sauce over the chicken breast.
Pour all this over the pasta and have yourself a grand old time. If you did everything right, it should be delicious on so many different levels. I know I did, and I'm so glad about it.
Special thanks to my roommate Gino for taking some of the pictures and to my brother Alexander for sending me that spectacular elephant garlic!
Thanks for reading!
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