Beer Pretzel Pasta (Ariccia) - Clobbered Heap

Date of Incident: 3/4/2012

For this Sunday's update, I'm breaking form a bit. I have two pop-up dinners to attend this coming week, so I will be updating about each pop-up the night after. Please expect reviews of those on Tuesday and Thursday evening. For the regular blog update, I decided to make a new tag to throw every other random thing into called Clobbered Heap - should be a nice inside joke for all the programmers out there.
I met with Yao from {Insert-Food} and Roddy from Rodzilla Reviews for lunch. It was the first time Yao and Roddy met each other and they got along just like old friends. I was pleasantly surprised that Roddy had been entrusted with a care package for us; it was a new "secret" hand-made pasta from Ariccia Market. Apparently this was a nice care package preview of the market and I was more than happy to help test out a new product idea.
I've actually been asked by a few chefs if I can actually cook; I guess this is the chance for all of you to decide for yourself. If I had to evaluate myself, I'd probably call myself a cook over a chef. Yet for some reason, I found myself oddly inspired by the "Beer-Pretzel Pasta" that had been given to me. Bobby used some beer instead of water to mix the flour and also mixed in real crushed pretzels to get the authentic flavor. I tried a few strands raw and could in fact get the taste of the crushed pretzel flavor mixed with that Bavarian beer flavor.
I remembered some advice that Bobby had given me in the past in that the pasta itself has flavor that I would want to taste, so I should keep it simple in order to taste the pasta. When Bobby cooked the pasta, he used brats to stay in the same plane of Germanic flavors and paired it with a mustard cream sauce. I decided to change the flavors a bit and settled on a beer-pretzel pasta in brown butter sauce with chicken parmesan sausage.
I'm not really a cookbook author, so I'm just going to list out the things I used and someone smarter than me can figure out the correct proportions:

• Ariccia hand-made pasta
• 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
• meyer lemon
• unsalted butter
• a lightly flavored sausage that doesn't overwhelm the pasta
• parmesan cheese (for garnish)
• salt (for the pasta water)

The first thing I did was start to boil the water for the pasta. I added a generous portion of salt to the pasta water as all chefs recommend.

The second thing I did was start to cook the sausages. I wanted to get some nice caramelization on the outside and make sure I cooked it all the way through since it was made of chicken

I then set about making the brown butter sauce. Once the butter was browned, I dropped in the garlic bits and squeezed some meyer lemon to stop the cooking process.

At about the same time I dropped the pasta in the pasta water. Because this pasta was different, it only took about 1 minute for the pasta to be cooked well in the water.

I then transferred the pasta into the brown butter sauce along with a bit of pasta water.

About 1 more minute later allowing everything to combine, I was ready to plate.

I shaved some parmesan over the pasta since I didn't season it in the pan. I also sliced some more of the meyer lemon since I had already cut it open and wasn't sure if the dish would need more acidity. It turned out that the amount I used was about correct for the whole dish.

Conclusion:

The beer pretzel pasta was really the star of the dish. Even though I was eating pasta, I got notes of a good baked pretzel. I thought the brown butter sauce was a great sauce as it highlighted the pasta without overwhelming the flavors. I can't wait for Ariccia to open so I can get my hands on some more exciting pastas.