Spaghetti al Limone (plus Homemade Fresh Pasta)

After Tomás's super recipe, something simple but unusual.

Ingredients for 4 people
400 g Pasta
200 ml Cream
2 lemons.

The quantities in this recipe are somewhat by eye, especially the amount of lemon zest. This pasta dish is very good with fresh pasta, but you can also make it with regular (dried) pasta.

There are several brands of fresh pasta on the market; the ones I like best are Rana and Buitoni, in that order. As for dried pasta, I really like De Cecco, but for me the best is without a doubt Voiello. It's hard to find here, but if you travel to Italy, take the chance to buy a few packets of Voiello — it's the bomb.

There's also the option of making the pasta yourself. It's not excessively difficult, but it is very, very laborious. If you have a machine to roll it out and then cut it, it's obviously less work, but I warn you, it's still a lot of work. At the end I've included a fresh pasta recipe

To make the sauce (il sugo) for this recipe is very simple: grate the zest of two lemons, only the yellow part. The quantities are by eye; I've put two lemons to stress that you need plenty of zest — for example, for 4 people I'd use the zest of two medium lemons. Heat about 200 ml of cream and, before it boils, add the grated lemon zest. Keep the cream with the lemon zest over gentle heat for 2-3 minutes, stirring constantly. Then take it off the heat and mix with the pasta, and enjoy an original pasta dish.

Note: this recipe is much better if you use a Microplane grater, because it gets plenty of lemon zest in fine threads that almost melt into the cream.

In case you feel like making the pasta, here's a fresh pasta recipe:
 
Fresh pasta ingredients
500 g flour
5 eggs
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 tablespoon salt

First sift the flour and make a mound with it, then make a small well in the middle (like an active volcano) and put the eggs, oil and salt inside. Now lightly beat the ingredients inside the volcano and start working the flour from the outside in. It needs to be kneaded for a good while (at least a quarter of an hour); a Thermomix or a kneading machine can help here — if not, patience. The dough should be firm, more or less like shortcrust pastry, but very elastic and shiny. Depending on the size of the eggs, the oil, the temperature, etc., you may need to add more flour, by eye. It's best to let it rest for between half an hour and an hour.

Now all that's left is to give it the shape you want. You don't need a machine — you can roll the dough out with a rolling pin and cut it with a knife — but it helps. For cooking, plenty of salted water, boiling uncovered. There's no need to add oil to the water; Italians don't, and their pasta turns out really well.

Enjoy.

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