Noodling

noo·dling \ˈnüd-liŋ, ˈnü-dəl-iŋ\ v. To catch a catfish with your bare hands because you're a hillbilly on a seriously misguided macho trip.

There's no catfish involved in this dish, but the noodles turned out so huge, it made me think of big 60lb catfish that hide in holes in the river bank and grow fat on the fingers of hayseeds.





I used my Mom's recipe for making the noodles: Crack some eggs in the bowl, add flour until it's pasta. Roll it out and cut it in strips, lay it in the boiling broth.



No measuring beyond counting eggs. I used six because I wanted plenty of leftovers. I'd reduced the broth with the leftover brisket last weekend, reduced it even with the addition of two more quarts of chicken broth, as well as adding about 3oz. of tomato paste.



That had reduced it down to less than two quarts, and since I was out of chicken broth at this point, I added a bit of water and some beef bouillon to extend the stock. The cut up brisket was in there, too, of course (I only fished out the potatoes and carrots from the roast stage of this deal).



I cut the noodles two ways: with a pastry blender, because the blades appeared to be about the right; then I found that flouring up the rolled out dough and rolling it and slicing like a cinnamon roll worked just as well. This is how my Grandma reportedly made them. Mom uses a pastry knife, but I don't have one of those. I didn't realize the noodles would swell so much in the soup. There's nothing in them to make them rise, but there you go.

The result was perfectly delightful, but it took almost a half hour to reach al dente.

I finally know why people bother with pasta makers. It was all I could do to roll the dough out to about 3/16" thick. For a lot of traditional pastas, a double roller with a crank to force it through would be the only way to get the job done.



This was the perfect thing to have tonight, as it was 11ºF outside when I got it dished up.



For my next not-so-amazing feat, I think I'm going to see if I can't figure out how to make pierogi.