Homemade Pasta Is Easy When You Have Three Hands

The Haterade Mailbag returns against all odds and most wishes.

Oct 07, 2024

The haters are celebrating: my output has dwindled in recent months while I adjust to a new (and temporary) government job. What I am doing is not too secret or important to discuss, but it is too boring. The main takeaway is that Haterade is not too offensive to bar me from public service, and I must redouble my efforts.

I’ve dropped some recent articles and updates at the end of this newsletter if you’re curious about what I’ve been up to, but for now, let’s just dive into reader questions.

the “365 party girl” of food-borne illness.

Andrea:

What is something that is obnoxiously intricate to make but worth the effort?

I believe in keeping this newsletter as un-aspirational as possible, which means I am not going to tell you to make a beef Wellington. I have made puff pastry from scratch, and I feel zero obligation to do it again. I live with someone now who makes his own koji and garum and vinegar and other little tinctures, and I am very impressed by all of it, but I look upon these feats much as I look upon the feats of an Olympic gymnast. Is it theoretically possible for me, with my equivalently human body, to do these things? Yes. But it is not what I wish to do ~with my one wild and precious life~. I wish to eat potato chips, and some day to lie down in a ditch to die.

Anyway, “intricate” is relative. So from the perspective of a lazy, workaday Cook, my answer is homemade pasta.

I resisted for a long time, and I still cook with dried pasta most often. I belong to the Sfoglini pasta club (flex!) and the shipments have been load-bearing, from a mental health perspective.

But you really can’t beat the taste and texture of fresh pasta. Rustic biangbiang noodles or gnocchi are relatively straightforward. But every time I have to pull the pasta roller out from storage, I wince. Is it worth it for perfectly smooth and symmetrical ramen or fettuccini? Yes. It is also an immensely frustrating machine designed for freaks with at least three hands.

I’m told there are models you can clamp to your prep table, which would solve most of my problems, but I prefer to stick to what I know and complain about it.

Jerry:

How do home food safety rituals align with (or diverge from) restaurant standards?

No one’s asking, but I would rather lick almost any surface in a restaurant than in someone’s home.

At my last restaurant job, every closing shift required me to unlock the wheels of a 400-pound prep station, pull it out from the wall, and sweep and mop behind it—never mind that the restaurant retained a separate janitorial staff.

Compare that to the kitchen in the home where I’ve lived since 2016. Do you know the number of times I have pulled my prep table out from the wall so I can clean behind it? It’s not zero, but it is also not 10.

Restaurant food safety is a completely different animal, with restrictions most home cooks would never consider. Do you have a separate hand-washing sink that you never use for food prep? Do you only store raw chicken in the lowest drawer of your refrigerator? Do you date every container of leftovers before you pop it in the fridge? If the answer to any of those is “no,” you’d likely fail a health inspection.

My partner has attempted to impose some of these rules in our home kitchen, with limited success. We are locked in a perpetual stand-off between my sensible, Midwestern aversion to food waste and his unreasonable, elitist aversion to food poisoning.

Granted, some food safety requirements can feel like hygiene theater. Most health departments ban wood surfaces in restaurant kitchens—cutting boards, knife racks—despite conflicting research about their safety relative to plastic.1

But the long and short of it is that most restaurant kitchens are a hell of a lot cleaner and safer (at least, from a public health perspective) than home kitchens. This is one reason why I encourage people to be a little more circumspect about blaming restaurants for food poisoning.

There’s been a lot of awful reporting on restaurant food safety from lazy news outlets, most of which repeat the same claim from this 2014 CSPI study: “you’re twice as likely to get sick eating at a restaurant than you are at home!” The reporting never mentions that the CSPI study measures the prevalence of foodborne illness by “outbreaks”—meaning two or more people fell ill from the same source—reported to the CDC.

Comparatively few people are going to experience an “outbreak” of food poisoning in a private home, and even fewer are going to be self-reporting their spouse’s home cooking to the CDC.

It’s true that if a restaurant is cooking with contaminated food, it has the potential to get dozens of people sick. But that’s a function of volume, not risk. The number of people who get sick at restaurants is always going to be higher than in a private home. But the percentage is likely a hell of a lot lower.

Darren:

When I go out to restaurants, I often look at the menu from a perspective of what's "worth it" to order because it isn't something I'd make at home, or something that restaurants just get "right." Do you have any go-to restaurant dishes you'd recommend for reasons like that?

Given my earlier rant, the answer is obvious: fresh pasta.

I do order fresh pasta whenever I can. But my honest answer to this question? A beautifully composed salad.

I do not make big, beautiful restaurant salads at home because I do not wish to prepare and serve 23 courses in one afternoon. My house salad these days is whatever kale’s salvageable from the garden, carrot ribbons lopped off haphazardly with a vegetable peeler, and a fake Caesar dressing (mayo, garlic, parm, lemon juice, fish sauce, S&P). In the vein of imitation crab, I suppose I should call it Kaesar.

But at a restaurant! At a restaurant, I will order the bowl of mixed greens with pearl barley, marinated asparagus, roasted Jimmy Nardello peppers, za’aatar seasoned sourdough croutons, pickled onions, thick wedges of heirloom tomato, toasted pepitas, and a 12-ingredient dressing.

At a restaurant, Maximalist Salads make sense. Few of the salad’s components are going to be used in just one dish. The pickled onions and toasted pepitas on your salad are probably cribbed from a chicken mole plate; the marinated asparagus or roasted red peppers might be from a pasta primavera or a “harvest bowl.”

Try hunting for remixes and repeats the next time you read a restaurant menu. It doesn’t ruin the magic—it makes me more appreciative of the ways a practical chef or GM can manufacture abundance by making the most of what’s at hand.

Jonathan:

It seems like Japanese food might be having a moment in Kansas City. I say that with hesitation, remembering that it was less than five years ago that Komatsu, Columbus Park Ramen, and Shio Ramen all closed within a few months. Curious to hear your thoughts on this one. Personally, I think KC is long overdue for a Japanese food revolution.

Despite a few recent openings, I think the Japanese food scene in KC, like the pizza scene in KC, is a bit dusty. Sama Zama doesn’t get a lot of buzz these days, but it’s still pretty good—and has miraculously held on despite moving to a setback location in Westport that seems destined to hold a vape shop.

The new players have been hit-or-miss. KC Craft Ramen is justifiably well loved and has the best ramen in town (though this is not a super high bar to clear these days). Kata Nori has filled a definite niche with its focus on hand rolls, and I’ve liked both of my meals there.

I had high hopes for Noka, a restaurant that ostensibly opened to showcase “Japanese farmhouse” cooking and seemed to be banking on no one in the city knowing what that meant. It has since rebaselined to become the restaurant it was always meant to be, which is to say: a pan-Asian conceptual mess at war with its own aesthetic principles. I may be—am—a crank, but I have limited interest in eating Kung Pao Brussels sprouts in a haute-concrete dining room surrounded by enormous funerary urns. The best thing I can say about Noka is that it looks expensive, which it is.

I miss Bob Wasabi and Shio Ramen. And writing restaurant reviews, apparently.

And finally, from Jake:

Why is Hot Ones so popular? I’ve watched a couple and I cannot tell you any of the questions that were asked because the physical pain of the interviewees was more interesting to watch than anything else. It also makes me uncomfortable so it is not something I watch regularly.

The standard answer is that Sean Evans is a great interviewer, which I think is broadly true. He does his homework and asks interesting questions! The show’s gimmick—grilling celebrities while they munch through a series of progressively spicier wings—ought to help. Capsaicin, the compound that makes peppers taste spicy, can release dopamine and endorphins and provide some stress relief generally, which is good for loosening up your subjects.

But I’ve watched a few episodes and I, like you, tend to remember the subjects’ reactions more than any particularly revealing or insightful answers. I suspect most people watch the show for the same reason they read this newsletter: morbid fascination. Perhaps a few of you are here for the writing and culinary advice. But I assume most readers open these newsletters to see if I am about to die.

Liz, what have you done for me lately?

Thank you for asking! I am always here to Demonstrate Value.

I’ve published a few things for Serious Eats in recent months, including this recipe for Kansas-City-style cheesy corn, which I highly recommend you make. I’ve also got some new Eater pieces up on KC restaurants in general and barbecue spots in particular.

And this coming Saturday, I’ll be presenting a couple food writing workshops at the KC Library for the Heartland Book Festival! I would like the record to show that I did not title the workshop. Both offerings appear to be sold out, but send me an email if you’re desperate to come, and I’ll see if I can smuggle you in under a large trench coat.

Haterade is a free newsletter sustained by maladapted viewers like you. If you’d like to support the Haterade Foundation for Shoddy Food Science, you can become a paid subscriber (no promises, no perks!) or stuff some cash in the tip jar here: Venmo | PayPal

This cutting-board study is probably the most damning in that it suggests maple wood boards retained more bacteria than plastic after tests simulating commercial use. And yet the researchers still conclude:

“The numbers and frequency of bacteria retained on previously washed wood boards is small and sporadic, therefore suggesting equivalence in their food safety attributes. The relative balance of advantages between wood and plastic cutting boards may thus be a function more of durability and economics rather than their ability to control cross-contamination between foods.”