Tajarin, step by step

Continuing along the "this is really a lot of work" theme, we decided to make a traditional Piemontese Tajarin. Tajarin is an egg yolk rich pasta, in fact the ratio is 40 yolks for one kilo of flour. We made a smaller amount but kept the same ratio. We used 10 egg yolks and 250 grams of flour. We used medium eggs and the ratio was not nearly enough to make a moist dough. I would guess we could have used another 4 or 5 yolks to moisten the flour properly. So...being completely surrounded by no eggs, I did the only think I could think of...I added a little water. ..I know that's cheating and I promise that if I had had more eggs I would not have never done it but I had no choice. Here is how it went:




Yep, that's 10 egg yolks!










Don't be shy...fingers in!










Rolling out the dough...









Ready to cut...











On the chitarra...










All done!










Add a little butter and some shaved truffle and presto!









The final close-up




Now, I want to be honest, this was not great Tajarin and many true Piemontese will scoff at me because proper Tajarin is golden yellow. What went wrong? Well first of all we didn't have the right egg/flour ratio and we had the wrong eggs. We needed real farm eggs. The color was off, it should have been a rich golden color but don't get me wrong, it tasted really good, but grocery store eggs just don't cut it. Next time we will use real farm eggs and I think that will make a huge difference.