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Rolling with the mattarello

The sfoglina's tools are simple: a long Italian rolling pin, a wooden board, and her hands. The technique is older than written record. Worked correctly, a 400-gram ball of dough becomes a translucent sheet, large enough to drape from a doorframe, in under fifteen minutes. The pasta machine is a useful modern shortcut; the mattarello is the original.

The tools

The mattarello is the Italian rolling pin: a single long cylinder of beech or maple wood, typically 80 to 100 cm long and 3 to 4 cm in diameter, without handles. Its length is its key feature. A British or American rolling pin with handles is short (40 to 45 cm) and is designed for pie pastry, not pasta sheets; it cannot, in a single pass, roll a sheet wide enough to make full tagliatelle. A proper mattarello can.

The spianatoia is the rolling board: a flat wooden surface, traditionally beech or chestnut, 80 to 100 cm long and 60 to 80 cm wide. The grain runs along the length. Beech and chestnut are slightly absorbent — they take up a faint amount of moisture from the dough — and have a fine grain that provides just enough grip without sticking. A wooden table top will do; a marble or stone surface, though it conducts heat away nicely on a hot day, is too smooth and the dough will slide.

A small bowl of flour for dusting sits within arm's reach. A long, sharp knife for the eventual cut. A tray dusted with semola for the finished nidi. Beyond that, nothing.

The starting position

A rested ball of dough — the standard 1 : 100 dough for four people, 400 g flour and four eggs, kneaded ten minutes and rested thirty — is unwrapped onto the lightly floured board. The ball is flattened by hand into a thick disc about 15 cm across. The mattarello is dusted lightly with flour.

The roll

The technique has a distinctive rhythm and is best taught by watching a sfoglina; in text it is approximated as follows.

1. The initial pass. Place the mattarello across the centre of the disc. Roll outward from the centre toward the far edge, pressing lightly and evenly. Lift; roll back from the centre toward you. Repeat two or three times, lengthening the disc into an oval roughly 25 cm long.
2. The quarter turn. Lift the dough (it will be slightly tacky underneath; if it has stuck, slide a long thin scraper or the back of a knife under it), rotate it 90 degrees, and re-dust the board underneath if needed. Roll again, centre outward, in the new orientation.
3. The expansion. Continue alternating — roll, lift, turn, dust, roll — gradually working the sheet outward in all directions. The dough thins as you work; after five or six rotations, it should be a roughly circular sheet 40 to 50 cm across, maybe 2 to 3 millimetres thick.
4. The lift and stretch. Once the sheet is too large for the board, the sfoglina begins to lift it over the rolling pin itself. Roll the near edge of the sheet onto the pin, lift the pin to suspend the sheet briefly, and let gravity assist the stretching. Lay it back down, partially overhanging the edge of the board. Continue rolling in this fashion; the sheet now thins by both pressure and gentle hanging weight.
5. The final thickness. Continue until the sheet is thin enough that you can see your hand placed beneath it through the dough. In the Bolognese phrase, you should be able to read print through it; in practice this is around 1 mm or slightly less. For tagliatelle, this is the target. For tajarin, the sheet should be slightly thinner still; for pappardelle, slightly thicker.

A skilled sfoglina performs this entire operation in 10 to 15 minutes for a four-egg dough. A first attempt by a home cook will take 25 to 40 minutes, with frequent pauses to rest the wrists. The technique becomes faster with practice; the dough memory of the hands does most of the work after a year or two.

The sfogline of Bologna

The trade has its own name. A sfoglina (feminine; masculine sfoglino, rare in usage) is a maker of sfoglie — pasta sheets — by hand. The trade has been historically female-coded in Bologna; the wives and grandmothers of the city's restaurants and households produced fresh egg pasta as a daily routine, often as a small earning activity selling sheets and stuffed pastas to neighbours and small shops.

The trade has been deliberately preserved by Bolognese cultural and civic institutions. Cooperatives such as Le Sfogline operate in the city's central markets, including the Mercato delle Erbe; cooking schools (the Bologna campus of ALMA, the Casa Artusi connection in nearby Forlimpopoli) run sfoglina courses for amateurs and professionals; the title is now a quasi-formal professional certification recognised by the city. The 1972 deposit at the Chamber of Commerce was, in part, an act of defence of this trade against the rise of industrial fresh pasta.

Why it produces a different pasta

Hand-rolled pasta differs from machine-rolled pasta in subtle but real ways. The mattarello works the gluten in multiple directions as the sheet is turned; the machine works it primarily in one direction (the direction of feed). The hand-rolled sheet is consequently slightly more relaxed, with a less pronounced grain; it cooks more evenly and absorbs sauce slightly better. The surface, against the absorbent wooden board, retains microscopic texture — not the smoothness of a steel roller — that helps sauces grip.

None of this is to dismiss the pasta machine, which produces an excellent ribbon and is the practical choice for most modern home cooks. But the difference between a hand-rolled and a machine-rolled tagliatella, in a side-by-side test with the same dough and the same sauce, is detectable. The hand-rolled sheet is the original; the machine sheet is the convenient daily approximation.

After rolling

The sheet rests for 5 to 10 minutes after rolling, lightly dusted with flour, to dry the surface enough to prevent sticking during the cut. Then it is rolled loosely into a flat tube and sliced with a sharp knife at 8 mm intervals; see cutting the ribbons. The whole sequence from mixed dough to nidi on the tray, for a skilled sfoglina, runs about an hour. For a home cook, two.