Making Pasta In A Parmesan Cheese Wheel

Cheese wheel pasta has constantly been featured across the internet, so I finally had to give it a try. So, we shipped an 80 pound parmesan cheese wheel straight from Italy. The first trip, it was damaged in transit. I don’t know exactly what that means…did it roll off the truck? Did somebody “accidentally” damage it so they could eat it? I mean, who doesn’t want some fresh Parmigiano Reggiano. But it really does make me think. Hmm…

But the second trip, it made it all the way to my kitchen in Boston. After learning the delicate yet demanding process of opening the cheese wheel, we dug out a “bowl” within the cheese, lit it on fire to get a cheesy sauce, then added our fresh, homemade egg pasta to with some garlic cream sauce and blended it together. The result? Indescribable.

Homemade Pasta
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 eggs + 4 yolks

Cream Sauce
1/2 cup butter
4-6 cloves garlic
2 tbsp all-purpose flour
2 cups heavy cream
grated parmesan until thickened sauce

SUBSCRIBE TO CATCH GORDON RAMSAY
╔═╦╗╔╦╗╔═╦═╦╦╦╦╗╔═╗
║╚╣║║║╚╣╚╣╔╣╔╣║╚╣═╣
╠╗║╚╝║║╠╗║╚╣║║║║║═╣
╚═╩══╩═╩═╩═╩╝╚╩═╩═╝

——————————————————————-
follow all of these for cheese

• Snapchat – https://www.snapchat.com/add/nick.digiovanni
• Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/nick.digiovanni/
• TikTok – https://www.tiktok.com/@nick.digiovanni
• Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/nick.digiovanni
• Text Me – https://laylo.com/nickdigiovanni
——————————————————————-

Nick: Today we have an 80lbs wheel of parmesan cheese straight from Italy. I just wanted to cut right to the chase, but it’s still sitting in the lobby of my apartment, so let’s go down and grab it. Vinny: What are you doing? Nick: So we have parmesan cheese. Vinny: Okay. Why are you in my room? Nick: Can I just open it here? Vinny: Can you open it? Yeah. No. You can invade my privacy. Nick: I got it and open it. Oh. Vinny: You’re prepared? Nick: No, no. Vinnie, you always like to see the packages. Vinny: I mean, this is true. You normally do have some fun stuff. Nick: Oh, man. Vinny: Yeah, this looks pretty legit. Nick: Seriously legit. Vinny: He’s so good at this. It’s pretty damn cool. Oh, come on, Nick, come on. You know they don’t use those muscles. Get there. This is so heavy. All right, look at that. See that thing? Look it. Nick: There’s a there’s a barcode on it. This is crazy. Vinny: Well, since you invaded my privacy, I think it’s only fair that I get a piece. Nick: Wheels to the elevator. I would say that’s probably best. Thanks, Vinnie. Oh. You’re welcome. Oh, now, let me just tell you, this thing was not easy to bring in. What you’re looking at right here is a Parmigiano Reggiano straight from my homeland of Italy. And, you know, it’s funny. I’ve been trying to get this thing in for weeks. Months, even. But the first time around, it was damaged in transit, and I have no idea what that means. All I know is I got a notification as it was on its way, that something had happened halfway through its path. Maybe someone decided they love cheese and just dropped it on purpose so they could take it home. But the important thing is it’s here now. Now, I want to talk a little bit about this before we go and cut into it. But the first thing I want to say, because I have to say it, is that it smells amazing. Oh, God. Now there’s something really cool about a parmesan wheel like this. The first thing that we see all around the side is Parmigiano-Reggiano. But there are more specifics that we can get into which are quite cool. This large stamp right here is just a quality stamp where the number right above it tells us the farm that it came from in Italy. I love that you can trace it right down to that very spot. Over here is a seal from the producer itself that we can actually just wedge out with one of our little parmesan knives. Now, if I spin the wheel, there’s a little something right here, you’ll see that, says DOP. This stands for Denominazione di Origine Protetta, which means protected designation of origin. The Italians don’t mess around with their cheese. So what DOP tells us is actually from Italian law. Sort of like champagne coming only from champagne, France. This shows that this is legitimate parmesan, i.e. it’s either from Parma, Reggio Emilia or Bologna. The last thing you can see is I spin it around is February 19th. Just like fine wine. The longer parmesan is aged, the nicer it typically is. This wheel right here is 24 month aged, and you can actually sell parmesan before it’s been aged at least 12 months. So this is a pretty good wheel of parmesan cheese right here. Let me put it this way. I don’t have anything left in my piggy bank after this one. All right. So here’s how it’s going to go down. We’re making pasta inside this wheel. But first we have to cut it in half. So we’re going to cut it like this I want to show you these two knives because this will be the first knife that I use. And I just thought I’d show this in comparison to this. The knife I typically use in videos, we actually don’t need my regular chef’s knife. So I can toss this aside. Now to start, we’re going to take this cute little knife right here and score around the entire wheel of parmesan. What’s actually really cool is that they pretty much give us a line right down the middle to perfectly do this scoring. For right now, I’m just trying to get that initial line. I’m going to come back around it again to get a deeper line, but for now, this is all I need. Once I’ve gotten this nice liner on the cheese, I’m actually going to take the back corner of the knife instead of the top, which will allow me to dig in a little bit here and slowly go back to further solidify that line. Now I’m basically starting to dig into the actual cheese itself to get into that Rhine, which we need to cut through, because this is such a beautiful piece of cheese. I’m really trying to do it justice here with nice clean cuts. Now we’ve got another knife that we’re going to use here. If you can see up close. It’s a very weird shape, very specific to a cheese like this. And it has this extremely sharp knife tip here. I’m basically going to punch that into my cheese and then pull really hard to start cutting that rind. This thing goes through like a breeze. And you can see that when I leverage it like this, the rind comes right out just a bit. Now we have these tools which are basically wedges that go into the side of the cheese to leverage it open. This to me is the part I’m most looking forward to. I think it’s going to be satisfying to finally have that cheese pop. We’re going to pick an area right on the side of the cheese and wedge this all the way in, and as we go, we’ll go back and forth a bit to start to break the cheese apart. Once that’s in, I’ll wedge it just a little bit back, turn my wheel of cheese and go to a space just a little bit over. Same thing here. I wedge it all the way in there, moving that around to break apart that cheese and then bring it back again. Now I’ll spin my cheese around to the other side and wedge another one in, shifting back and forth to break that cheese open. Then I’ll remove that first wedge, spin our wheel again and go in on the opposite end. This right here is an arm workout that I could have never imagined. And I’ll repeat this process until the wheel starts to feel a little bit looser, at which point it’s basically just going to crack. I’m not kidding when I say that this is actually a legitimately really good arm workout. And I used to go to the gym quite a lot, but I pretty much haven’t been since Covid started. Now, to try to finish things up here and open this wheel up, I’m going to wedge all those levers somewhat close to each other and start kind of lifting and pushing up to see if it’s going to give the fact that it’s. Still not willing to go. Tells me that there’s probably a few spots that still haven’t been touched over here, so I’m going to put in just a little bit more work with some of these wedges over on the edges. Now, I’ve gone around the entire wheel with these wedges and I think we’re ready to pop. Oh, whoa. What? All of that hard work has paid off. When it cracks open like that, you get these beautiful flakes of cheese, this gorgeous, almost crystal like hunk that you’ve gotten here. You simply can’t get that any other way. Opening a parmesan wheel by hand is truly something special. I know I’ve already taken a few bites, but I have to try this cheese while it’s so fresh like this, because I don’t know how many times in my life I’m going to get cheese this fresh. That cheese has more parmesan flavor than I even knew parmesan could have. There’s almost these tiny little crunchy crystal flakes when you bite into it, and it’s so smooth, cheesy and creamy. Without a doubt the most mind blowing parmesan I’ve ever tasted. But of course, we’re going to fill this whole thing with pasta. So let’s make that dough to start our pasta dough. This one is special. So I want to make a 12 yolk pasta dough yolks only in my bowl where I’m going to put the yolks I’m going to add in a little bit of olive oil because I don’t want those yolks sticking to the bowl. I want them all staying nice and whole in this bowl here, I’ll crack my eggs, then gently drop the whites in with the shells, which I can save for later. Those will make a nice, tasty omelet. As for these gorgeous little yolks, I’ll gently place them all into the bowl with the olive oil. I’ll repeat this process very carefully with all 12 of my egg yolks, trying to keep them all whole and intact. There’s nothing like making a beautiful handmade pasta dough with all fresh, intact egg yolks. All of you who subscribe to our channel probably remember the time that we made cured egg yolks and only had 12 yolks left, but broke one of them, leaving us with 11. This time around, I’m going to try to make sure every single egg yolk stays fresh and unbroken. Now, on our cutting board, we’ll put down a little over two cups of all purpose flour into the middle of the flour. We’ll make a nice little well and then into that well we’ll go our 12 beautiful egg yolks. If we want we can add just a little bit of olive oil here. And then we break those egg yolks. Such a satisfying thing to do. Slowly bring in that flower from the outside to incorporate that into your yolks, gently and gradually mixing until everything is nice and well combined. At this point in the process, I usually like to bring in my bench scraper, which lets me easily bring everything all together. Now we work through our dough and after some pretty solid elbow grease, but nothing quite as bad as opening up that parmesan wheel. We have a beautiful disc of pasta dough. At this point in time, I’ll take my ridiculously oversized plastic wrap and rest this in the fridge for half an hour while our dough is in the fridge. I want to take a few moments now to tell you about today’s sponsor, HelloFresh. This is America’s number one meal kit. Forget the grocery store, you’ll get kits you can use with fresh ingredients to prepare perfectly portioned meals. Personally, I’ve been getting HelloFresh because of my commitment to eat more sustainably this year. Hence this veggie kit that I’ve gotten. And all of this is pre-portioned to make sure I make that perfect amount of food. Hellofresh also has a 25% lower carbon footprint than meals made from store bought groceries. Hellofresh also gives back. They donated 4 million meals to charity in 2020. The recipes are delicious. All of this comes straight to your door, hence the name HelloFresh. And I think it’s pretty evident by looking that these ingredients are very fresh. To finish off my garden spinach ricotta ravioli, I’ll add a bit of sour cream, all of that beautiful zucchini, and of course our ravioli. So here’s what I got for you. Go to hellofresh.com and use code Nick 12 to get 12 free meals, including free shipping. That’s a lot. You literally just have to plug in that code. I’ve never met anyone that turns down free food, so go to the description and check that out. And a big thanks to HelloFresh for being today’s sponsor. Let’s get back to our wheel of Parmesan and finish up that pasta. First we’re going to carve out that parmesan wheel because we want to make sure that we have a nice bowl. May actually be able to use some of these wedges, which will allow me to get some nice hunks of parmesan cheese out of here. I absolutely love these rustic looking hunks that are coming out of the cheese. Just look at how gorgeous these are. I feel like I’m handling gold once I’ve wedged out lots of this cheese. I think I’m actually ready to start digging it into a bowl shape. I’ll start by scooping out the remaining bits that are here, and then gradually starting to carve the shape with my spoon. If I can get this in a perfect bowl shape, it’ll look absolutely gorgeous. Because of how compact this cheese is, you don’t realize how much will actually come out of such a small portion of your entire wheel. I’d guess that you can get hundreds and hundreds of portions of cheese out of this entire wheel. And when I say portion, I mean those massive hunks could be in the 1000 range with how big this thing is. And once we’ve created a nice bowl, we can set our wheel aside. Now that our dough has been resting in the fridge for a while, I first want to show you how bright and yellow this thing is. That’s what you get when you use all egg yolks. Now first we’re going to hit this dough with some nice flour. Really making sure that that’s not going to stick to a bunch of stuff. Then we’ll take that same bench scraper we used earlier and cut this in half. Press out your dough until it’s nice and thin, flowering a little bit as you go, and optionally using a rolling pin to push it out even further. Once you’re ready to go, push it through your pasta maker. We should get a gorgeous, beautiful, and smooth yellow dough. And as I think I’ve discussed before, I always like to fold it together and put it through a second time to get out any air bubbles. Once your dough is rolled out the first time, turn up the dial and start to roll it through on a thinner setting until you’re ready to make your fettuccine. Once it’s finished, we can roll out our fettuccine. Now we roll out the fettuccine, creating these beautiful strands of pasta. Now we’re going to make a really fast garlic cream sauce. And then we’re just about ready to fill that parmesan cheese. So don’t go anywhere. Chop off each of the heads of the garlic for our garlic cream sauce. I’ll add about a stick of butter and let that melt down. Once that butter is melted, I’m going to take a few cloves of my fresh garlic and press this right in here. Holy oh. I prefer a garlic press to mincing garlic any day, because it really just saves you from all those nasty smelling cutting boards and dishes. Now into this butter, I’m going to slowly sprinkle in a few tablespoons of flour while still whisking, and this will make us a nice garlic roux. Those clumps that you see in there aren’t the flour, it’s actually just that minced garlic. Once we’ve stirred this around a short bit and let it thicken, I’ll add in about two cups of heavy cream. And then once I’ve let this start to heat up, I’ll start grading in some of the parmesan right out of my wheel. Can you imagine if I had the nerve to use Pre-grated parmesan right now from the store? Think about it this way you can buy fresh parmesan. That’s at least somewhat recently been taken out of a full parmesan wheel like I’ve shown you. Or you can buy pre grated parmesan, which has probably been sitting on the shelf a few years, but not exactly aging in the good way. Just think about that next time you make that choice it’s going to be on your conscience, not mine. Once this thickens up into a really beautiful buttery cream sauce, we can set this whole thing aside and we’re ready to cook our pasta. Once our water is boiling, we’ll salt our water like the ocean because we really want that salty flavor in our pasta. And once the salt has had a minute to settle and dissolve into the water, we’ll toss in our pasta. Now, before we put in that pasta, we’ll pour in a bit of white wine and light it on fire. You might not be able to see the flame right now, but you can probably hear it. And there’s tons of heat coming off this wheel of parmesan right now. You can probably start to see some of these flames of the fire, which is kind of faint but still definitely there. But it’s allowing me to do is sort of make a cheese sauce out of this before we even add any of the pasta to that. And because it’s so hot in there, the cheese is starting to melt in the base of my wheel. Now that my eyes are tearing up again and crying a little bit because of all that alcohol that’s just come off, we have this really warm cheese paste at the base that we can now use to make the. Of our pasta, we’ll pour in that pasta, which of course we need to break apart a little bit here. Then we’ll come in with that thick cream sauce. Letting it go all over that pasta. And at this point, I’ll take my forks and mix this all in together to make our beautiful pasta inside that wheel of parmesan. I have to say, this is one of the most beautiful, coolest, most rustic things I have ever seen in the kitchen. And I have cooked a lot of things in my life. Just listen to that pasta sound. Just for some color. I’m going to finish this off with a few chives before I dive in. I’m just going to add a little bit more parmesan right on top of this, because you can never have too much parmesan cheese. It’s time to take a little bite. Nick. Vinny: Yeah, dude, you still have my cart. I can’t go home until I get this bag. What are you doing? Why are you laughing? What are you doing? Nick: You want some pasta? Vinny: Oh, wow. All right. Nick: You know what? Vinny’s gonna try it before me. Vinny: You know what? I’m in. Hopefully this is good. Nick: It’s nice, like fresh pasta. Vinny: Wow. I think my taste buds are on dancing with the stars. Is it good? Yeah. That is. That is damn good, sir. Pretty good. Yeah. Well, so am I. Nick: Am I good on the cart? Vinny: No. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Dude, that’s fucking fire. Nick: Now we can’t eat anything with cheese before letting our furry little friend try it himself. So I’m going to put pesto down. And don’t worry, this is going to be sanitary enough. I’m going to scrape off this part of the cheese after. The funny thing is here, I think he’s just going to eat the cheese and not actually go for the pasta. And that’s okay because there’s too much garlic in the pasta. But this is probably one of the best days of Pesto’s life. Pesto. Say bye to everybody. Okay, but now I think it’s time to dive in. Let’s give this a try. That right there is some good pasta. Honestly, I’m even having a little bit of a hard time describing. All of it is so, so fresh. I just feel like you can’t get much fresher than this. I mean, sure, I can take a trip to Italy next time and get the wheel right from the cheese maker in some beautiful basement where they’ve been aging it for a while, and that would be a little bit fresher. But I mean, this is pretty darn fresh. One thing you may be able to see when I hold the pasta up close is how well our beautiful cream sauce holds to our pasta. What’s great about that is that we’ve nailed the consistency of that cream sauce. That garlic in there is perfectly there yet nice and subtle. The pasta is perfectly soft and has that light egg yolk flavor with that fatty, rich and creamy texture that we look for in a pasta. While the entire experience of eating it out of the parmesan wheel elevates everything in every single way, so much about tasting and enjoying food comes from your smell, and sitting in front of a parmesan wheel like this means you’re smelling all of that cheese on the outside of the wheel. Seriously, this thing is cheesy. Just looking at this gorgeous half wheel is so, so special. Now, before I finish, I just want to say thank you so much for watching. You are all the reason that I can get things like this and make videos like this. And there’s lots more coming where that came from. All you have to do is make sure you toss the video a like and a comment there, which helps so much. Let’s try to get this one past the 100,000 likes, why don’t we? And in the meantime, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and the notifications icon. I have a lot of cheese to finish.