TCD 005| Fresh Pasta Pappardelle with House Cured Pancetta and Fava Beans

I'm really proud to present this video because it's a long time in the making; not necessarily the completed dish itself, but all the fundamental cooking techniques required to actually execute this dish properly. When the thought struck to start a cooking "blog" (back before I even created FCS), I originally intended to chronicle advanced cooking techniques from a working chef's perspective.

Yet wanting everyone to be able to play along at home, I was concerned that I would constantly have to stop and explain that "the reason your knife cuts aren't accurate is because you need to use a professional pinch grip and utilize your guide hand properly." Or "your pan reduction sauce isn't turning out because you skipped a couple key steps in the stock making process and then later the reinforce and reduction stage.

So instead of jumping straight into advanced cooking topics, I realized it would be helpful to lay down a base curriculum, that started with the basics and progressed much like culinary school would. This is what led me to start podcasting, originally with The Free Culinary School Podcast, which latter morphed into this site, StellaCulinary.com.

What excites me is that for literally years now, as I've preached and posted off and on about technique being king and creating your own recipes. This pasta dish illustrates a new "baseline" of where we'll be going in the future. This isn't a recipe, but more of a collection of recipes and techniques brought together to create a delicious completed dish that I would be proud to serve to a paying customer. But more importantly, this video illustrates how you yourself can combine the techniques covered in our video tutorials and audio lectures to find your own unique style and develop your own creative recipes.

That is what Stella Culinary is all about.

Just to illustrate the versatility this pasta dish allows, here are some ideas:

• Instead of using pancetta, you could easily use duck confit or even sauted pieces of a pork trotter terrine.
• Instead of the minced garlic, you can use either whole cloves of roasted garlic or even blanched garlic.
• Instead of using fava beans, you can easily use blanched and peeled asparagus, or even broccoli, including the stems.
• If using the duck confit instead of pancetta, you can also peel and blanch salsify, cut thinly on a bias, maybe add in some orange segments, toss in some wilted frisee and garnish with toasted walnuts.

The list can go on, but instead, what are your ideas? How can you take fresh pasta and turn it into your own unique dish? Let me know in the comments!