“Can’t beat quality ingredients and tradition,” writes Melanie Lionello of @frommylittlekitchen as she begins to make pasta from scratch. You probably already know what she’s going to do. She molds a mound of flour into a little mountain, then carves a well in the middle. She pours eggs into the well and whisks them with a fork. They slowly absorb grain after grain of flour until the whole thing is a soft, bouncy ball the color of toasted hay. It looks effortless and beautiful, the way nonnas (not any specific nonna, but the platonic nonna, the imagined nonna) have been doing it for generations.
Has it ever worked like this for you? This is how it works for me. I push the flour into a mound and drop the eggs into the well. No matter the ratio, no matter how much flour or how much egg, there is a crack somewhere and the eggs seep onto the counter like lava out of a volcano. I try to shore up the edges but they’re already soggy with yolk, my counter becoming sticky as I panic to scrape it back into shape. So I start kind of whisking, kind of mashing it all together, until, sure, there’s a dough. It’s a mess every time.
And yet, every pasta authority insists on the volcano, when surely there must be a better way. In her seminal cookbook The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, first published in 1992, which includes work from her 1973 work The Classic Italian Cookbook, Marcella Hazan says the well method “permits you to adjust the proportion of flour as you go along.” The flour absorbs little by little as you whisk the eggs, so you see the exact moment the dough has enough. Traditionalists seem to maintain that there’s no improvement on the method. Missy Robbins, the chef behind Brooklyn pasta powerhouses Lilia, Misi, and Misipasta, writes in her cookbook Pasta that making fresh pasta is “all about touch, and the well allows you to get acquainted with the dough as you mix and knead it and to commit the texture of the final product to memory.”
However, Robbins says that if your eggs burst through the barricade, you can just scrape the eggs back into the flour with a bench scraper “until you have a mixture that is thick enough to contain itself,” which seems antithetical to incorporating flour bit by bit, but at least she acknowledges my reality. What I don’t understand is, even if the goal is to incrementally add flour to feel how the dough changes, why can’t it be done in a bowl? Italians have bowls.
My coworkers’ first thoughts were that the well method persists because it looks good on television and social media. In 2003, disgraced chef Mario Batali demonstrated the well method for Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal on his Food Network show Molto Mario, in which he’d show off his authentic Italian expertise to adoring guests. Look how rustic, how romantically simple it seems. How beautifully each yolk nestles into its nest. Look how fun it can be to add even nontraditional ingredients to the dough, like canned pumpkin or blue spirulina, as long as the method stays the same. It’s just more visually arresting than dropping all the ingredients in a stand mixer, which of course nonna didn’t have.
Italian cuisine tends to garner a kind deference to tradition that veers into fetishism. There are rules: Cappuccino cannot be ordered after 10 a.m., one must never use garlic and onion in the same dish, it’s sacrilegious to use cream in carbonara. Italy has more protected foods than any other European country, labeled to preserve quality and tradition, sometimes at the expense of culinary innovation.
Alberto Grandi, a Marxist academic who has argued that many Italian traditions are newer than they’re made out to be, says adherence to (or creation of) these traditions is about bolstering nationalism, often at the hands of right-wing governments. “It’s all about identity,” he tells FT. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths.” Grandi argues that fresh pasta was not a mainstay of the Italian diet until the later 20th century, and certainly not unique to Italy. And, for example, recipes for French ravioli (a culture no less finicky about tradition) say you can make pasta in a bowl.
Andrew Janjigian, the baker and recipe developer behind the newsletter Wordloaf, defends the well method, even if it can get messy. “It is simply easier to knead a dry-ish dough on a surface, because it is easier to be sure that it is coming together evenly,” he says. “Another way it is ‘better’ is that once the eggs are fully incorporated and a cohesive dough has formed, you are essentially kneading the dough in a bed of flour — you basically have two ‘phases’: a loose dough, and a bed of dry flour, that slowly come together. In a bowl, it would be a little harder to prevent clumps of unhydrated flour from forming in the interface, and would require more work to eliminate them.”
However, Janjigian acknowledges that one issue is the average home cook is probably using less flour and fewer eggs than a professional kitchen, and that this method just works better when you’re making a volume of pasta typically unsuitable for one meal at home. (Robbins’s recipe for egg dough calls for “24 to 26 egg yolks,” if you have that in your fridge right now.) He suggests there might be a hybrid method to pasta making, honoring tradition and practicality by taking some portion of the flour (it could be anywhere from half to two-thirds, by his estimate) and combining it with eggs in a bowl and kneading until it comes together. When the dough is uniform, you can then transfer it to a bed of the rest of the flour on the counter to continue kneading. That way, you can keep some control over the moisture of the dough without risking yolks oozing across everything you own.
Plenty of other professionals seem to be on Janjigian’s wavelength, and are okay with ditching the traditional well method. Samin Nosrat suggests making a well in a bowl in her recipe for fresh pasta dough. Dan Pelosi also makes his dough in a bowl before turning it out to knead on the counter. And Giada De Laurentiis — who was born in Italy! — has made pasta both in a bowl and in a food processor.
Maybe I’m just being a hater. After all, what home cooking doesn’t involve a little mess, and in fact isn’t made more fun by craggy hands and stained aprons? But there are plenty of traditions home cooks have happily given up when it’s clear convenience doesn’t come at the cost of quality. No one is expected to hand-whip meringue anymore, so you might as well save yourself some cleaning time and mix your eggs in a bowl. Italy can deal.
