I’m happy to announce that chocolate croissants are overwhelming choice for how I should use my See’s chocolate chips.
Now I have an excuse to stop swooning over photos of croissants and actually make them.
I have to decide whether I want to use the Pain au Chocolat recipe from Tartine…
Or the croissant recipe from Tartine Bread that begins with a bread starter.
Or both?
In other news, we broke in my new pasta machine this week! I’ve had the KitchenAid pasta discs for a couple of years, and they work fairly well, but I accidentally destroyed the fettucini disc and the lasagna disc kind of sucks, so unless we want round noodles, we have to roll the dough with a rolling pin and cut noodles with a pizza cutter. While that method works well, it’s hard to get the noodles very thin or evenly sliced, so they don’t always cook quickly or uniformly. After months of deliberation, I put a Williams-Sonoma gift card that I’ve been holding onto since Christmas to use and bought a pasta machine.
I made a batch of semolina pasta dough for the machine’s first run, and then I realized that it was way too wet to make it through the roller without sticking to every surface that it touched. Slightly frustrated, I quickly made a batch of egg/all-purpose flour dough, and the fun began.
Making pasta with the machine was super easy (although you might think otherwise by reading some of the reviews - tip: use common sense when the directions seem backward), and although we’ve always been amazed by the results when making pasta from scratch, this batch was easily the best yet. The noodles were thin and uniform, and while I’m fairly certain that any noodles would taste great in homemade pasta carbonara, these were exceptional. Now if only I could recreate the mind-blowing Pasta Negra with Sea Urchin, Chili, Mussels, and Tomato that we had at Bar La Grassa two weeks ago…
