Flour and Eggs

In 1154, an Arab geographer watched a Sicilian town ship dried pasta across the Mediterranean by the boatload, already using a technique home cooks still fight today without understanding it. Flour and Eggs treats that technique as what it actually is, a measurable chemical reaction, not an instinct a cook either has or lacks.Most pasta advice stops at "it should feel right," leaving anyone without an Italian grandmother's hands stuck guessing. This book replaces the guesswork with the hydration ratio a Chicago food rheologist uses to explain why dough behaves like a solid one moment and a liquid the next, and exactly how much water or egg a given weight of flour needs.Recipes for hand-rolled Tuscan pici, chewy semolina cavatelli, and classic egg pasta walk through gram measurements rather than cup estimates, and a later chapter follows an Austin recipe developer's gram-by-gram engineering of gluten-free dough, built from xanthan gum and psyllium husk instead of wheat protein.Discover how weighing water instead of trusting a feeling turns fresh pasta from a mystical kitchen ritual into a repeatable, exact process.