Giada's Pappardelle Pasta with Sausage Ragu | Giada Entertains | Food Network

First up is the egg dough for my pappardelle. We're starting with one and a half cups of a double zero flour, which is really just super fine flour. You could use all-purpose, but it won't make the pasta as light as a double zero flour will. We're also going to add a quarter cup of semolina flour. As you can see, it's a little bit different in color. The color's a little more yellow. It's still a durum wheat, but it's processed a little bit differently, so it gives a little bit of a coarse texture to the pasta, which helps the sauce stick to the pasta. So it's really great to use a little bit of both if you can. And then what we do is make a little well. You can make it in a bowl, but I think it's more fun, and you can get a better handle on the pasta itself if you just do it right on the board. And right here, we have eight egg yolks. And I already separated the egg yolks. You see how beautiful and rich they are? And that's what gives the pasta, the fresh pasta that much richness, is all the egg yolks. And then we're also going to add one whole egg. So lots of egg in here. And a little bit of salt just to season it all together. Make the pasta taste really good. And then I'm gonna take a fork, and I'm just gonna break up the yolks just ever so slightly inside. And as you can see, the flour's keeping all the egg inside. And remember, it's okay if it gets a little messy. That's part of the fun of making fresh pasta. Put that there, and then little by little, allow the egg to start absorbing a little bit of flour. Just keep mixing it. And even if the egg gets out a little bit, it's okay. It'll just kind of absorb it, and you just keep moving it until you get a little ball of dough. And then you just continue to knead the dough. Okay, so my dough looks great. You see how it comes together into a ball? So now, I'm gonna pop it in the fridge for a little bit so it can chill and set. There we go. In the fridge we go. So my dough for my pappardelle is ready. And you can see that when you press it down like this, it just bounces back slightly, so you know it's ready. And you make sure that after you leave it in the fridge for a bit that you let it come to room temperature because it'll be much easier to work with. So we're gonna cut the dough in fourths. There we go. I'm gonna start with one piece. You see how malleable and how easy it is to move around? What you wanna do is you wanna make it thin enough that we can fit it in the pasta machine. So you wanna start at the thickest setting so that you can stick the pasta right through there. Let's see if it'll fit in the thickest setting. Yep, it sure will. And you just kind of keep bringing it through here. There we go. There we are. So basically, you just keep feeding it through the machine until you get the thickness that you want. Look at that baby. All right, she's ready. I'm gonna put a little bit of flour. And what I wanna do is I now wanna cut it into long, thick strips called pappardelle. So thicker than a linguine and thicker than a fettuccine as well. So what I like to do is I'll just cut it in half here. And then I put them side by side. I take my little pizza roller. You could also use a knife. And you want the pappardelle to be about an inch in thickness. And I know that I wanna make them about that long. And even if they aren't 100% correct in thickness, you're fine. So once you've cut them like this, you wanna make sure and put them on a tray that you've dusted with flour. You could do semolina flour, just so they don't stick together. It's fresh pasta, so it's quite a delicate. You just wanna make sure that as it warms up, it doesn't stick together. So I like to put a little semolina flour on a tray and I just kinda dust them just like that. See? And we've got our fresh pappardelle. So I'm gonna finish cutting the rest of the dough. And then we're gonna get started on the ragu. I'm browning two pounds of sweet Italian sausage and chopping up a red onion for my sausage ragu to go with my pappardelle. And as you can see, they're ready to go in the back. But before I start cooking them, I wanna get started on the sauce. And I love the red onion because I like that sweetness that it gives the ragu. And this is a pretty quick ragu that we're gonna make. All right, time to add the red onion in. And the red onion and the carrot will add lots of body and flavor to the sauce. And for me, this is sort of a weeknight sauce because it's so fast and easy. This is sweet Italian sausage and I find it to be quite fabulous. Okay, so now that we've got the onion going, time to peel my carrot. Carrots and onions are sort of the base flavor to a lot of Italian sauces. Sometimes we add celery as well, but in this case, we don't need it because we've got the sweetness from the carrot and from the red onion. There we go. Peeled our carrot. And we're gonna chop this baby up. Okay, carrot's in. Do a little bit more salt. We're gonna deglaze with a little bit of white wine. Again, what we're doing when we're deglazing the pan is kind of taking all the little brown bits off the bottom of the pan and that's where all the flavor develops in the sauce. You definitely don't wanna skip this step. Just use the spoon to lift out all of those brown little bits. Okay, so now for the pureed tomato. And this isn't sauce, this is just pureed tomato. So we're making the sauce. One and a half cups of the pureed tomato. And I'm gonna take a little piece of the Parmesan cheese rind and we're gonna throw it right in there. To me, the secret to a great ragu, especially when you're cooking it quickly, is the Parmesan cheese rind. It slowly melts within the sauce and it just gives it this richness that you can't really get from anything else. I'll let this cook for a little bit. In the meantime, I'm gonna grab my pasta. So, look at these beauties. This is so fun. They're so beautiful. If the pot's big enough, you can probably cook all of these. If you don't have a pot big enough, then definitely cook them in batches. And they cook really quick. That's the great thing about fresh pasta. And give this a quick little stir. They cook for like two minutes and you don't wanna overcook them because they fall apart if you do. And just always make sure that your water is still hot, that it doesn't come down in temperature because once you add the pasta, sometimes it does. Look at that. We're gonna finish this with a little bit of basil, fresh basil, and some fresh parmesan cheese. So, we've got our basil ready to go. Look at these babies. And we're gonna put them right in there. So fun. Look how beautiful it is. I'm gonna put a little bit of parmigiano on top. So, let's add some fresh parmigiano right on top of the pasta. We'll add all the basil. And now we can start tossing. Yeah, look how beautiful this is. All right, let's make sure it's perfectly seasoned. Let's see here. It's funny because pappardelle can be a little bit trickier to eat. Great toothsome sort of texture to it. Mmm, sauce is perfect.