Pasta making and wine pairing workshop at Josephine Estelle

During the pandemic, plenty of people tried their hand at baking bread. For some, pasta could be the next frontier, and there are many doughs that are much easier to make.

At the Italian restaurant Josephine Estelle, executive chef Trey Williams is leading a trio of pasta-making workshops and tastings. A native of eastern Tennessee, he started making pasta in Memphis at Catherine & Mary’s, a sister restaurant to Josephine Estelle. After six years there, he moved to New Orleans in May to become the executive chef at Josephine Estelle. The first pasta class is at 2-4 p.m. Friday, Aug. 25. Each class is a stand-alone session that includes a pasta-making demonstration and a tasting with different sauces and wine pairings. For information about Josephine Estelle, visit josephineestelle.com. Tickets for the pasta workshops are $120 via acehotel.com/new-orleans.

Trey Williams: I started making pasta with these restaurants. I always cooked pasta, but dried pasta. I never made fresh pasta. That was new to me.

We do two main types of pasta, both at Catherine & Mary’s and here. One is an extruded pasta. It’s made with flour and water, and you load it into a machine which pushes it through a die. It makes shapes like tubes that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to make by hand.

The other style is called laminated pasta, or handmade pasta. It’s made with an egg dough. That’s for more intricate, folded shapes, like stuffed pastas like ravioli, agnolotti and casonsei. That’s what we focus on for the pasta-making classes. We take an old laminated sheeter. It’s like an old-school hand crank with a motor on it, so you can use both your hands. We set that up in our dining room and run through the whole process.

Part of the class is a demonstration. We make dough. We sheet it out. We shape the pasta. It depends on the class, but tagliatelle is the most basic iteration. The second part is a meal with wine pairings. In the past, we’ve paired tagliatelle with three sauces so you can pair it with three wines. In the past, we’ve done cacio e pepe as the first sauce — Parmesan and pepper. We’ve done amatriciana, which is a bacon ragu. Then our third course is a mawmaw’s gravy. It’s like a bolognese. It’s one of (co-owner/chef) Mike Hudman’s family’s recipes, so it goes way back. It’s got beef, pork and chicken in it.

Williams: It’s something people can do at home. If they’re looking for something to do with their partner or their family and want to do something special for dinner, it’s a fun activity. It takes an extra 45 minutes. It’s not hard. We focus on the laminated dough because it’s way easier to execute at home. People think of it as this mystifying, intricate thing. It can be if you get really involved, but really, it’s not difficult to make good fresh pasta at home.

One reason we like the egg dough is that it’s very sturdy. With bread, you have to factor in humidity in the way it rises. You don’t want to overwork the dough. With the pasta dough, it’s very sturdy and heat is not going to throw it off.

You could get fancy with it. You could use spinach so it turns green, but really we just focus on the one dough and all the things you could do with it. It’s very versatile. With a smaller class, we might do something more intricate. We have done tortellini before. It’s not hard, but it takes time to learn how to do it. And you can do that at home too.

Pastas we’re making are Italian, but there are a lot of similarities to other cuisines. I haven’t made a lot of dumplings, and the doughs are different, but the processes are very similar. At Catherine & Mary’s we had a really great pasta cook. Then he moved on to an Asian spot and started making dumplings for them. He was great at it.

(At Josephine Estelle) we’ve rolled out so many different menus and so many different shapes. The idea is that different shapes pair better with different sauces. That should always be intentional. On our COOLinary menu, we’re doing our version of tortellini and brodo. That’s a classic Italian dish. There are many different tortellinis, but it’s always the tortellini shape with a broth. The reason is that tortellini is a really good shape to pick up a loose broth. It’s basically got a little cup in it.

Williams: There are ways you can mess up pasta. The big mistake is making it more complicated then it needs to be. Some people swear there are tricks. There’s no trick to it. You want your water to be hot, and don’t overcook the pasta. That’s all there is to it.

People talk about putting olive oil in their water, and that doesn’t really work. You’d have to use so much olive oil.

Some people swear by salting their water. That’s great. You can do that. But we don’t do that at the restaurant. We use a big pasta cooker, and water evaporates, so if we did it, it’d get too salty and we’d have to monitor the level of salt. If you’re only cooking one round, sure, go ahead.

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