What is semolina dough?

Answer 1

Semolina is abyproduct of wheat processing.It does not contain the bran. Raw and dry, it looks a little like grainy cornmeal: tiny yellow pellets about the size of a grain of sugar. To make the dough, mix it with water, oil (olive is preferred), and, if desired, eggs. Mix, knead, roll, and cut into the desired shape. Though you can knead and roll the dough by hand (and Italian housewives did just this for centuries), you may find the dough so stiff as to be unworkable by hand, so a pasta machine is a useful timesaver.

The dough recipe I use with myhand-crank pasta machine is:

2 c semolina

2 tbsp olive oil

1/2 c warm water

Mix all the ingredients in a medium bowl and blenduntil a uniform stiff dough forms. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rest for 15 minutes or so.Divide the dough into three or four equal portions and run each portion through the kneading rollers of the pasta machine, set on the widest spacing, until the dough becomes smooth and golden. Run the dough through successively narrower spacings of the machine until the sheet of dough is the desired thickness. Now it's ready to cut into the desired shape using a sharp knife or the cutting rollers of the machine.

Because it's fresh and moist, pasta made this way needs to be cooked for onlya few minutes, rather than the 10-15 minutes dry pasta needs. The fettuccine I made last month took only two minutes to cook. Buon appetito!