Todd Gray: We are making Orecchiette; the ear-shaped pasta dough. We are going to start by adding our semolina flour to our mixer. We'll turn it on low, a good pinch of salt, slowly drizzling our warm water in. You can see now the dough is starting to come together. We can increase the speed and our dough is together. So now we need to turn our dough onto our cutting surface, all purpose flour, and a little additional semolina; place this on our cutting board to prevent any sticking of the dough to our work surface, and we'll knead this gently, and our dough should be silky with not too many holes. We need to wrap our dough, place in refrigerator for at least one hour or even overnight.

So I have brought my dough out of the refrigerator, unwrap it. We are going to cut into pieces and then roll them into logs, working from center and pulling towards the ends using all of your fingers to help elongate the pasta dough, and make it into an even cylindrical shape. We will cut this into small little quarter-inch piece rounds, and we are going to push out our Orecchiette into these little ear-shaped pieces, probably 15-20 pieces per person. We need to now blanch and shock the dough. Put a little bit of couple of tablespoons of salt into our water, put our pasta into the basket. This pasta is going to need about four minutes in the water.

We have a bowl of ice-water next to our boiling pasta. Once it's cooked to al dente, where it is not too firm, it is not too cooked we will then plunge it into the ice-bath until the rest of the cooking time. We'll remove our pasta from the ice-water, and toss it with a touch of olive oil in a bowl to prevent any sticking. Great cooking doesn't have to be complicated. Enjoy!