You Can Cook in Your Fireplace // Homemade Pasta for Campfire Lasagna
Making Homemade Fresh Pasta
Making homemade fresh pasta is easy and fun! Most recipes I consulted agreed that eight to 10 minutes of kneading with the dough hook on low speed in a mixer like my KitchenAid works well for making fresh pasta, or ten seconds in a food processor.
My KitchenAid Stand Mixer is the 6 Quart Professional in Onyx Black.
The recipe for fresh pasta is pretty easy – four large room temperature eggs, two and a half cups of flour – all purpose is fine – a tablespoon of olive oil and a teaspoon of sea salt.
If the dough is too sticky – add flour, if the dough is too dry – add water. Let your fresh pasta dough rest at room temperature for 30 minutes, or refrigerate for up to a day.
Rolling Is the Harder Part
We used a mixture of rolling a bit with a rolling pin, then putting it through the pasta attachment on my KitchenAid mixer. Eight times on the 6th setting, twice on the 5th width, and twice on the 4th narrower setting did the trick.
My attachment set includes a sheet roller, a spaghetti cutter, a fettuccine cutter maker, and it came with a cleaning brush.
I read through dozens of reviews to choose this 3 Piece Pasta Roller Cutter Attachment Set Compatible with KitchenAid Stand Mixers.
Here’s a tip – head over to the Amazon Warehouse like I did. That saved me about 40% off the usual price in exchange for ordering a “used” set. I saw a few fingerprints, but the devices looked completely unused. “Used” sometimes means someone ordered a product and returned it without even opening or using.
You Boil Pasta!
I did not know. Your fresh pasta gets – and this is where sources disagree. =Boil anywhere from 30 seconds to one to five minutes, al dente, depending on the thickness of your pasta.
Some recipes say use the pasta immediately. We went with the one that said a 30-second ice bath was necessary to completely stop the cooking process.
Lasagna Creation
This part was easy – ground beef, pasta sauce, Italian herbs, mozarella, fresh spinach, ricotta, onions, peppers, garlic, and our fresh pasta.
It doesn’t seem what order you put the ingredients because it’s all wonderful once baked. Well, one caveat – put sauce in the bottom first so that your fresh pasta does not stick.
Fireplace Cooking
We used a seasoned cast iron Dutch oven to bake our creation. It’s a three-legged variety, and lacks the shelf on the lid for piling coals.
Bill measured the temperature, and reported anything from 250 to 350 degrees around the pot, and as high as 1,000 degrees!
It turned out 45 minutes baking time was a bit too long. We think 30 minutes would have been sufficient. The whole house smelled wonderful during the baking.
If we end up doing a lot of this fireplace cooking, I’m going to invest in this Texsport Cast Iron Dutch Oven because it has a lid with a shelf for coals.
Side Dishes
An enormous calabeza added a bit more vegetable to our lasagna dinner. I brushed the chunks in olive oil and herbs, popped it in the convection oven for 30 minutes at 200 degrees.
Even the seeds were delicious, and the low oven temperature allowed me to leave them in there long enough to be the best I’ve ever produced.
Prepping Veggies Faster and Easier
Once I experienced how fun it was to use the Pasta Roller in my KitchenAid, I headed back to the Amazon Warehouse to see what else I could find. Increasing my intake of vegetables is a goal of mine this year, as is making that goal easier to accomplish.
They haven’t arrived yet, but I’ve order the Spiralizer Attachment, also a Juicer Attachment, and, most exciting, a Slicer/Shredder set. I waded through dozens of reviews to find the perfect choice for each.
The juicer will be superior to my countertop model because this one moves in one direction. My current one swaps back and forth – often when I don’t even want it to reverse. The Juicer Attachment catch pan will be smaller, but I think pressing forward instead of down will be easier on the arms.
My Good Cook Hand Spiralizer takes a lot of effort. I’ll move it to our camping gear. My new Spiralizer Attachment can handle not only vegetables, but also fruit! It has five blades for peel, two thickness for slice, core, and two sizes of spiral. This means this device can replace my hand spiralizer, and also my Faberware Apple Peeler.
Best of all, the Slicer/Shredder set is going to take the place of my very-hard-to-clean food processor. I can’t wait! No more dragging that beast out of the cabinet and cleaning it.
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