Here’s another recipe we made recently with our pasta extruder, after trying our hand at bucatini and large macaroni.  This time we went with rotini, the spiral shape that everyone is familiar with from supermarket dried pastas.  It was fun watching these twisted shapes make their way out of the extruder, but then we had to come up with an interesting sauce to pair them with.  For inspiration, we browsed through some Italian specialty shops to see what they were serving up, and we came across something we’d never tried before – artichoke pesto.  In southern Italy this sauce was dreamed up as a way to put one of the local crops to use, since about half of the world’s artichokes are apparently grown in that region.  We discovered that this sauce is pretty easy to prepare, so we’ll show you how we made our pasta and then paired it with this unique spin on pesto.

You’ll need:

• Semolina flour
• 2 28-ounce jars of artichokes in oil
• Parmesan cheese
• 2 lemons
• Garlic
• Olive oil
• Parsley

For the pasta dough, follow the first two steps here, except you’ll need to set up your rotini die on your pasta extruder and set the stand mixer’s speed only to a 2.  As the rotini comes out of the extruder, use the cutter to make them into 2-inch pieces and then lay them out to dry in a single layer on your baking sheets.

The rotini will need to dry for about 3 hours.  You can make the artichoke pesto whenever you like – right before you want to cook the pasta, or stick it in your fridge if you want to prepare it ahead time:  in a food processor, add your artichokes and the oil they’re packed in, along with a cup of grated Parmesan, 8 garlic cloves, 1/3 cup of olive oil, pepper, and a small pinch of salt.  Zest one lemon and add that in plus the juice from the lemon.  Blend everything together until you have a sauce that’s smooth and somewhat thick – but if it’s too thick, add more olive oil by the tablespoon.

Then you can cook your pasta in salted water for 5 minutes, scooping out 1/2 cup of the pasta water at the end.  Drain the rotini, then place it back in the pot and mix with the artichoke pesto, adding in just enough pasta water so that the sauce clings well to the pasta but isn’t too watery.  Chop some parsley and stir that in too, then serve up your rotini – and if you want, you can cut the other lemon in half and char the halves on a stovetop burner for 1 minute, as an accompaniment to the pasta.

Making homemade pasta isn’t super easy, as you’ve seen – even with the extruder, which does the shaping for you, you’ve still got to make the dough and then stand by to cut off your shapes as they emerge, until all your dough has made it through to become pasta.  That’s why this sauce was really nice:  all it takes is throwing a bunch of things into a food processor and out comes a cool and interesting pesto.  We enjoyed the sauce paired with these little spirals, and we’ve now got three more shapes to extrude from the kit we got, so look out for more pasta coming your way!