black bean pasta

This pasta was super fun to make.  The recipe comes from the book The Everyday Gourmet by Sari Haag.  It came highly recommended on a couple of food storage sites I have visited, but I find it to be somewhat confusing in a lot of areas, and horribly indexed.  Definitely better than my whole food's kitchen's book, but still quite lacking.  However, there are tons more recipes, and they are categorized and tabbed - it's just that so many of the recipes refer you back to another recipe -or call for another recipe as an ingredient, or refers you to another recipe for the remainder of the instructions IF it is in the book (none of the bread mixes or biscuit mixes are in the book), the page number isn't listed and you have to hope you can find it in the index.  OK, sorry, enough ranting about the book.  It just annoys me that the thing cost $25 + and isn't better organized.
However, I really did like this recipe.  Like I said - super fun to make.  I know, who calls noodles super fun to make.  They are actually a bit tedious.  However, these actually turned out blue, and who doesn't love a funky blue noodle that has extra fiber and protein in it to boot?  Of course, in the book, the directions are all of 2 lines. Mix the 2 flours and proceed with the same method to make Homemade Egg noodles (see index)  Of course I've written it all out.  Have fun.
As with most things I make with bean flour, I think they smell very strongly of beans before cooking, but after cooking these just tasted like normal pasta.  You could sub out pretty much any dried bean flour for black beans, but like I said, I loved the blue tint these had from the black beans.

Black Bean Pasta

Ingredients

•¾ cup durum semolina (pretty sure I found mine at HEB.  It is by Bob’s red mill)

•1/3 cup black bean flour

•1/8 teaspoon onion powder

•1 teaspoon olive oil

•2 Tablespoons water  (or so said the original recipe.  I used 7 or 8 Tablespoons.  I’d start with at least 4.

Directions

1.Mix black bean flour, onion powder and durum semolina flour together. 

2.Knead in the olive oil and water.   Knead for 8-10 minutes –until you have a nice cohesive ball of dough.   (I’ve been experimenting with making pasta lately and it has been hard to know what the dough should look like.  Pasta dough is dry when compared to bread dough.  It should not be sticky at all.  However, it shouldn’t be so stiff and tough that it can’t be rolled thin either.  Add enough  water that is can be kneaded nicely, isn’t super stiff, but isn’t yet sticky.  When I started making pasta, I made it too sticky.  That makes it stick to the counter or pasta roller and makes it very hard to work with.  Once I figured out the right consistency, it really isn’t too bad to make your own pasta.   It does require hand kneading which is 10 minutes, but rolling and cutting go pretty quickly.)

3.After kneading,  Roll the dough in a ball and cover with a bowl or towel to rest for 1 hour.

4.Roll the dough out to the desired thinness either on the counter with a rolling pin, or with a pasta roller.  When you have reached the desired thinness, cut dough into strips (noodles) with a sharp knife, pizza roller, or the pasta roller.   (Or if your super fancy,  just run the dough through the pasta attachment of the kitchenaid or bosch.) I used the pasta roller method and cut spaghetti noodles.  (Mostly because I’d never done it before. )

5.Let hang on a rack for 30 minutes or store dried noodles for weeks in a jar. 

6.Cook in boiling water until the noodles float to the top.