DIY GOURMET: Your Future Lingo Should Forge Pasta Tense

Let’s not beat around the semolina-dusted bush: I’m in the pasta-making game for all the wrong reasons.

I don’t have an adorable Italian Nona willing to walk me through centuries-old family recipes scribbled onto wisps of onion-skin — I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure, that those only exist in Prego commercials. I’m not indulging in some sort of new-fangled diet intended to teach me to cook well, eat right and rub snake oil all over my nether regions to try and achieve enlightenment — diets and pasta typically don’t mix. And I definitely don’t have a lingering desire to cook my way through my nonexistent Italian heritage in the vein of a certain Julie and Julia — my unenviable last name is plenty evidence of that.

Truthfully, I don’t have even a quasi-noble reason to justify my foray into a culinary art form that, for me, begins and ends with blue boxes of Barilla with cellophane windows.

Really, my only motivations for cranking out strands of stringy noodles are tied to a desire to emulate a diminutive Indian man named Dev. And, of course, to impress a girl.

Let me explain. Dev is the name of comedian Aziz Ansari’s character in his alarmingly sharp Netflix series “Master of None.” In the show, Ansari’s character receives a pasta maker as a gift from his girlfriend and there’s a dreamy montage in which the protagonist whips up a toothsome-looking Carbonara. It’s endearing as all hell.

My girlfriend and I adore the show, she got me a pasta maker as a gift, and one currently nonexistent montage later, here we are, attempting to make that dreamy, starchy sequence a reality.

Except in my case, instead of consulting recipes and having an all-around organic experience in the kitchen like Dev does in the show, I called in the help of a cherubic butcher named Carmine Lonardo to guide me to pasta paradise. Turning raw eggs and flour into well-shaped noodles is — well, it’s freaking hard, and a lifetime of improperly cooking Easy Mac hasn’t exactly led me to believe that I’d be able to woo my S.O. with a homemade pasta on the first go. (Clearly, I’m not one to exactly ooze culinary confidence.)

Though scheduling difficulties prevented Carmine from providing as in-depth of a lesson as I originally wanted and, frankly, desperately needed, his sister, Louise, got me going in the right direction by prescribing the proper ingredients. I should clarify: ingredient — I already had eggs on hand at home. I snagged a bag of “00” flour — the super-fine stuff — for my forthcoming batch because that’s what Louise said her mother, Lois, has used to make her own homemade noodles for more decades than most American pasta distributors have existed. Produced by a company called Antimo Caputo in Naples, the amount of Italian scribbled on the side of the crimson bag, and the cartoon of a moustachioed chef whipping up his own noodles, led me to believe it was worth the steep $7 price tag.

After consulting a healthy number of online recipes and YouTube videos — I am a snake person, after all — it was time to unseal my Bed Bath and Beyond Brand Pasta Machine™ and stride into the kingdom of carbohydrates.

Shockingly, it wasn’t my worst kitchen voyage. That’s not to say the final product looked anything like Dev’s luscious creation, or really much more than gelatinous goo. It was more of a spätzle situation, at best, and calling the process a success would be akin to calling Ronald McDonald a culinary mastermind. But, hey, baby steps, or something.

Assembling the dough — whisking the eggs in a crater of flour followed by 15-ish minutes of mashing and kneading it into some sort of sphere-like thing — went well enough. Being able to pummel anything for that long always comes with a dash of catharsis.

The flattening and rolling process, courtesy of my glistening Pasta Machine™, also somehow went over without many hiccups. (After a brief respite of perusing Twitter to let the dough come alive and congeal, of course.) Then again, I didn’t have any on-hand noodle ninjas to critique what was surely a litany of egregious errors. Somewhere in Italy, a bona fide semolina samurai likely shed a single tear, and Chef Boyardee unleashed a vindictive cackle. But when cooking for a party of one, sometimes, often times, ignorance is bland bliss.

With several fistfuls of freshly cut beige tentacles in my hands, I dumped the stuff into a bubbling cauldron of uncertainty, and that’s where I made my unforgivable foible. All of the literature (SEE: TheKitchn.com) warns weekend pasta warriors that fresh noodles take only a few minutes to achieve al dente perfection — five minutes at most. After about 180 seconds, my opus resembled more of a wet Play-Doh than a golden bed of flavor.

Nevertheless, I still had to eat. To try and hide my wildly limp fiasco, I coated the newly softened tendrils with some sort of Frankensteined Carbonara using more eggs yolks, leftover pasta water, Parmesan cheese and cracked pepper. It wasn’t very good.

But now armed with a strainer-full of pasta knowledge and images of green-white-and-red flags flowing through my noggin, maybe, just maybe, I might be ready to recreate Dev’s delectably charming montage IRL — that’s how us snake people say “in real life.”

Sure, maybe my Carbonara didn’t look quite like the dish depicted in the show, but my trial run didn’t go as awry as it could have. Would I feed my final product to human beings with whom I have exchanged even fleeting comments? Unlikely. But I learned that pasta comes from places other than aisle three, and that fancy chrome kitchen equipment is intended to be, like, used. (You’re next, Señor Crockpot.)

I can’t say that the experience has exactly bolstered my culinary résumé. In fact, it may be more like a demerit, but I’m already mentally preparing to launch in again. Now, please excuse me while I spend the next 45 minutes air blasting flour out of my keyboard.