Kamut flour isn’t as well known as you’d think, given how mild it is, how increasingly easy it is to find (Whole Foods, Bob’s Red Mill) and how deftly it fits into recipes. For the whole grain baking book Kim Boyce and I are working on (more on this later), Kim’s been baking with Kamut and we’ve been talking about how it works. To this end, I called up Bob Quinn recently: he runs Kamut International, and it was his father and he who named–and trademarked–the flour. Kamut is a brand of Khorasan wheat, an old grain that’s related to durum. Because of this, Quinn told me that Italy now dominates the Kamut market and uses over half of the world’s Kamut to make over 1,800 different products. Chief among these is pasta. As Kim’s working on baking recipes, I decided to make pasta with some of the Kamut flour we have blowing (literally) around our respective kitchens. I used my standard pasta dough recipe and the girls and I had fettucini with our meatballs and marinara sauce for dinner tonight. The dough worked up really beautifully, soft and tender, but with more structure than when I make pasta dough with AP flour (I don’t use semolina very often). Golden in color, tender but with good strength, the pasta was wonderful. Here’s the recipe, which is just a standard pasta dough.
KAMUT PASTA
Makes about 1 pound of pasta
Although you can roll pasta out by hand with a rolling pin, I use my old Atlas hand-cranked pasta machine. It works great, and the kids love to crank the machine.
2 cups Kamut flour
3 eggs
1. Place the flour and eggs in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse about 1 minute until the dough forms a ball. Turn out the dough onto a floured work surface and knead it until smooth, 1 to 2 minutes. Depending on the dampness of the dough, you may need to work in a little additional flour until the dough is smooth, elastic and firm. Wrap the dough tightly in plastic and allow to rest on the countertop for at least half an hour to hydrate the dough. If not making pasta right away, refrigerate the dough until needed, up to 1 day.
2. Divide the dough into four equal portions. Taking one portion at a time, flatten the dough and roll it through the pasta machine. Allow each portion to rest on a floured surface while you roll out the others, adjusting the setting on the pasta maker so that the dough thins with each pass. (You will need to make 5 to 7 passes, depending on the machine.)
3. The pasta can now be shaped how you like it. For papardelle, use a fluted pastry cutter and cut each portion into noodles about 12 inches long and 1 inch wide. For fettucini, thread the pasta through the pasta machine. For lasagna, keep the pasta in long sheets or cut them in half. The pasta can be cooked immediately or dried overnight.
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