Last week Chef Matteo Carboni from the Academia Barilla Culinary School shared with us a few video tricks on how to prepare fresh pasta by using simple ingredients, and traditional techniques and pasta tools.

Following the Chef demo from our previous video, Chef Matteo Carboni introduces us to the pasta tools he will use to make Garganelli and Maccheroni alla Chitarra, two traditional Italian regional specialty types of pasta.

The main pasta tools will be a wooden pinroll, and also a manual pasta machine.

But the interesting traditional tools Chef carboni is going to use in the video demo are the Chitarra (in Italian, guitar - its strings can actually be played!) and the Pettine (in Italian, comb). Those pasta tools have been used in Italian regional cuisine for centuries and are still a good Chef’s help today.

Chef Carboni starts slicing the dough before passing it through the pasta machine, making sure to put the rest of the dough back in plastic wrap while working on each piece. The pasta machine will help create large and thin slices of dough, in a process of countinous flour dusting and machine rolling.

When the slice of dough is ready to be processed, Chef Carboni starts cutting it in pieces to prepare the Garganelli, that gets indivudually rolled on the Pettine with the help of a little stick and great manual skills to get their traditional shape.

To make traditional Maccheroni alla Chitarra (that Chef Carboni says are more like fettuccine, rather than maccheroni) Matteo will use, of course the Chitarra, and an energic action with the wooden pinroll, that immediately reveals the pasta.

As Chef Carboni suggests, you can use it for cooking straight away, or you can powder them with some flour, make single servings and freeze them until needed.

Buon appetito from the Academia Barilla Culinary School!

Welcome back to another instalment of the Academia Barilla Culinary School videos. Today Chef Matteo Carboni will show us how to prepare fresh pasta by using simple ingredients, and traditional hand techniques.

Chef Carboni is getting ready to prepare two different types of traditional Italian fresh pasta, Maccheroni alla Chitarra and Garganelli, but we’ll get there with the second part of this video next week. Today we will learn how to make a perfect dough, so let’s follow Chef Carboni’s culinary tips and Chef advices from the video below.

Chef Carboni starts with the ingredients: white flour and eggs, we are going to need about 100 grams of flour (3 oz. approx) for each egg. It all starts with the set up of a wheel of flour where to add the eggs that will be beated inside the the flour wheel.

Add a pinch of salt and one or two tablespoons of Italian extra-virgin olive oil, and keep beating and mixing, adding more flour until the mass of dough start to take volume. At this point it starts the manual operation of hand beating, see the video for detailed tips from Chef Carboni on how to manage this simple but pretty critical preparation step.

When the dough is ready, following Chef Carboni advice, it is wise to immediately wrap the dough in transparent film to prevent it from air exposure. The dough should rest for about 20 minutes in wrap, but you will have to wait until next week to learn how to prepare Maccheroni alla Chitarra and Garganelli!