Bush Pasta, Pasta Sauces & Pasta dishes-what's yours?

[Shalem]

MAKING LASAGNA: The basic process I use for making lasagna is I make the lasagna sheets with my mixer attachments like further above, but using white unbleached bread flour instead of semolina, as I can't seem to cook through the sheets properly with a semolina dough. Or one can use commercial packets of dried lasagne sheets or fresh lasagna sheets.

I make up the mince meat sauce and bechamel sauce. Here it's beef, but an option I can try next time is kanga or emu mince, and popping in some ground lemon myrtle, lemon ironbark or other spice into the bechamel. Likewise, any native spices I choose can go into my home made lasagna sheets.

Other suggested fillings might be: vegetarian lasagna with warrigal greens, pumpkin, commercial bush pasta sauce, marinated native feta cheese or commercial native spiced cheese. I made a pumpkin lasagna once from a recipe that my mother-in-law gave me, and it was really delicious & easy. It used silverbeet, pumpkin, feta cheese, cream and jar of pasta sauce.



I prefer home made/fresh lasagna sheets to dried packet ones because I can lay them more easily, cut them into size for whatever dish I use, and they taste much nicer.

Assembling a lasagna just involves layering. So I start with a layer of mince sauce on the bottom, then pasta sheet, then a layer of mince, then a layer of bechamel, repeat layers etc.



Here's the uncooked layers ready to go into the oven.



A cooked lasagna.

[Shalem]

Some fettucine I made last night using my mixer, pasta attachments and Dining Downunder pasta dough recipe.

My dough has white unbleached bread flour, egg replacer, some oil, Dining Downunder red desert spice.

(Unfortunately I'd ran out of eggs, and used an egg replacer in a pasta dough for the very first time. I've used bread flour instead of plain flour from the recipe, for the high protein content).



Warrigal greens pesto.

This uses blanched warrigal green leaves, chopped macadamia nuts, macadamia oil, crushed garlic done to a paste.

I didn't have bunya nuts available so used the macas instead.

Quite flavoursome



here's this pasta cooked up and tossed with warrigal greens pesto I made last night. Each plate was topped with finely grated Bidgee native cheese and few slices of smoked wallaby.

I was very surprised and impressed with the Bidgee cheese. I used it as I had no grated parmesan cheese, but I'm glad it turned out this way. The Bidgee cheese was very tasty and full of flavour, so much so (and this is no exaggeration), that I feel it makes a good, if not better, substitute for finely grated authentic (not processed) parmesan cheese for sprinkling on pastas and bolognese. I think the one I had on this was the bush tomato.

With the egg replacer, the pasta was more consistent with an asian rice noodle in its taste and texture after it was boiled, and I felt it was still tasty.

However, from now on, I'll definitely use the whole eggs as usual for the pasta doughs, last night was just a special case, but good to know I might be able to make rice noodles again!

[Shalem]

Next, I'll aim to make some warrigal greens fettucine from my leftover warrigal greens and maybe wattleseed fettucine.

It doesn't matter if I make more than I can eat in one go, because I have a pasta rack that helps me manage all the fettucine I produce.

These can then by dried fully, put away in the pantry, or dried for an hour and refridgerated.

I found this to be handy a few weeks ago, on my rare occasions of not feeling like cooking dinner. It was nice to be able to grab some dried home made pasta from the pantry and cook it up.

[Shalem]

Home made warrigal greens pasta dough. I didn't chop the greens finely, hence this sort of effect on the dough.

It uses 300g white unbleached bread flour/bakers flour, 1tbs olive oil, 3 x 60g eggs, 50g cooked warrigal greens and made by a mixer dough hook.




pasta sheets made with a mixer and pasta attachment using a fairly automatic process




warrigal greens fettucine on a pasta rack.

Unfortunately with this one, unlike some other pasta doughs I've made (eg semolina egg pasta), the fettucine strands didn't separate fully as they came through the pasta attachment, but they were still easy enough to separate by hand.

Raw texture was slightly different to others I'd made too.



Home made warrigal greens fettucine

ready for cooking or refridgerating.

I have yet to boil these up and do a taste test.

[Shalem]

Home made WATTLESEED PASTA - boiled





Wattleseed Pasta Dough (semolina egg pasta)

Using Mixer, flat beater and dough hook attachment, and egg pasta dough recipe from "Breadmaking Australia" book - Carol Bates.

She uses Simply No Knead Pasta Dura Flour, which I have tried and makes one of the most superb pasta doughs using my Mixer and Pasta attachments.

When I don't have this flour, I use fine semolina (called Semolina Flour from breadmaking stores. Fine semolina also available elsewhere).

I also added 2tablesps roasted ground wattleseed, which was first soaked in boiled water till it swelled up, and slightly more semolina as it was a bit wet during the stage when the mixer flat beater mixed it altogether.

There are instructions in the Mixer's Pasta Attachment manual on what process to use for forming a semolina egg pasta dough.



Lovely chocolate/coffee colour and speckled effect from ground wattleseed.




Wattleseed Pasta Sheets

When pasta sheets can be made from home, there is some versatility. Eg, not only is it convenient to cut down whatever size for whatever dish, but different Pasta Shapes can be made:

-lasagne
-fettucine
-bow ties
-pappardelle (wide strips)
-linguine (thin strips)
-ravioli & tortellini

There's instructions in the Mixer's Pasta Attachment manual on the procedure for forming sheets.


Wattleseed Fettucine

Once Wattleseed pasta sheets are formed by the Mixer and Pasta Roller attachment, they pass through the Mixer's Fettucine attachment.



Dried home made wattleseed fettucine dusted with flour.

Not only handy to keep in stock, but can make ideal gifts for friends/family, wrapped in cellophane, and maybe placed into a hamper.

[Shalem]

Home Made Vs Commercial Bush Pasta

As you're probably aware, commercial bush pasta is readily available online and other places. They look professional, both in the pasta and the packaging.

When I dry my home made fettucine on the pasta rack, the end result doesn't always look "professional" and neat. The longer I leave them on the rack, the more they're likely to snap or break in places.

When I dry them briefly for an hour & refridgerate them, as instructed in my mixer pasta manual, I feel they need to be boiled soon and eaten while they're fresh. However, the fettucine strands do stay in one piece (like in the photo of previous pages), aren't brittle or break off.

[Shalem]

Question: Can anyone suggest what's good to eat with wattleseed fettucine?

[Shalem]

LASAGNA & BREAD MACHINE PASTA PROGRAM



This pasta dough was made in my Morphy Richards bread machine which I referenced in Breads topic around page7ish and I used the bread machine manual's pasta dough recipe. I'm glad I came across this because firstly, it's only takes 50minutes with pizza program, & 2ndly I was surprised how well this pasta works with plain flour which the recipe specifies (Note: I had to add an extra egg for moisture). Typically high protein flour such as OO, bread flour, pasta dura flour or fine semolina are used for pasta so that's why the plain flour (which is not high protein) was unexpected. I'm pleased with this bread machine for having a convenient pasta recipe:- as it doesn't take long; it means I can use plain flour when I might be running low on or have no high protein flour; I can be versatile with adding extra ingredients like fresh herbs or bushfood spices like in above photo.



So with this dough, I made some lasagna & the mince used here is actually Kangaroo mince from supermarket. The preparation & taste of the mince, hence lasagna, was virtually same as beef mince so no difference except Kangaroo mince can be cheaper depending what kind of beef mince you buy.

[Shalem]

UTUBE VIDEO COOKING

Check out Jeff's utube video of Bunya Nut pasta. His videos are good in their production & communication.

http://www.youtube.com/user/mugsyjeff

[Shalem]

BUSH TOMATO FETTUCINE

Unless I haven't done a thorough search, there doesn't seem to be much around on making pasta with Australian native foods & this topic's been quiet for sooo long, so thought I may as well pop this in. Take a look at the Bush Tomato fettucine dish in Andrew's site www.andrewfielke.com. Don't forget to look at the rest of his awesome photo gallery. Talk about perfection. I wish I could attend one of his cooking classes or meals.

Another idea with bush tomato fettucine, in my Breads topic with Bush tomato grissini, I discovered that crushing whole dried Bush Tomatoes with my mortar pestle produced an interesting crush, little like chilli flakes, so this'll probably have a nice effect when mixed as an ingredient in pasta dough.