Playing With Pasta

Conceptually, I like the idea of colored pasta. Like every other chef - restaurateur & cooking enthusiast of the early 80's, I bought my bag of tri-colored rotini, I was suckered into the exotic colors, the jewel-toned raviolis, angel hair colored with pumpkin, sweet corn and roasted red pepper tortellini, the tantalizing herb & spice blends... It was a huge disappointment. The pasta was overly soft, much too tender, and the flavors were muddy and colors indistinct. Only the squid ink black pasta held any resemblance of regular pasta when cooked. However, the ink tends to vulcanize the pasta leaving you with black - slightly fishy - pieces of rubber.

Plant based food colorants don't really work very well when added to the dough.


Why? you ask..

Like fresh vegetables, powdered vegetable matter cooks at a faster rate than the bulk of the pasta dough. In order to get your pasta to a perfect al dente, you will end up over cooking the vegetable part of the mix by about 5 minutes. Over cooked vegetables = soft, grayish, pasty, the same thing that happens in the pasta. In addition, plant colorants are water based, and adding excess water (cooking) leaches out the reason you bought it in the first place.

Since premixing colorants obviously doesn't work, I wanted to play around with post coloring the pasta... i.e. infusing color into the cooking water.

The next 2 posts will deal with infused pasta in different ways. The first will be color and flavor, the second we're going to play around with the role of pasta in a dish. So, stick around!

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