Whose Dough Is That

September thirtieth. Here is something I did not know about myself until last Saturday: I have no instinct for pasta dough. None. I can cook, the standing order, the undocumented breakfasts, the whole thing, but pasta dough is apparently a different category of skill that my hands have never been briefed on. I know this because Simone's dough looked correct within about eight minutes and mine looked like a topographical problem for another forty-five.

Simone had mentioned the class back in August, in the same offhand way she mentions most things that turn out to matter, one sentence at the end of a Tuesday session, something about a community kitchen downtown doing a Thursday evening pasta workshop, did I want to come. I said yes without asking how long it ran or how much flour would be involved. Both answers would have been: more than I expected.

The instructor was patient in the way that people who have made pasta ten thousand times can be patient, calm, specific, slightly amazed that the heel-of-the-palm thing is not intuitive for everyone. I was everyone. Simone was not everyone. She has a thing where she commits to a physical motion faster than I do, some muscle-memory trust I seem to lack. By the third round of kneading I was just watching her hands and trying to reverse-engineer whatever she was doing.

the texture check, am I doing this right? (Simone: clearly yes)

We ended up with small folded shapes by the end, held them up for the obligatory end-of-class photograph, and I can report that mine was noticeably more abstract than Simone's. She did not say anything unkind about this. She did look at it for a moment longer than necessary, which is the same thing. We walked out smelling like flour and olive oil and I thought: I'd do that again. Not to get better, necessarily. Just because it's the kind of thing that is exactly what it is while you're doing it, which is rarer than it sounds.

the results. mine is on the left. I know.