Parmesan Cheese Wheel Pasta

Nick: Today we have an 80 pound

wheel

of Parmesan

cheese

straight from Italy. I just wanted to get right to the point, but it's still in the hallway 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 open it here? Vinny: Can you open it? Yes. No. You can invade my privacy. Nick: I got it and I open it. Oh. Vinny: Are you ready? Nick: No, no. Vinnie, you always like to see the packages. Vinny: I mean, this is true.

You usually have some fun stuff. Nick: Oh, man. Vinny: Yeah, this seems pretty legit. Nick: Seriously, legit. Vinny: He's very good at this. It's fucking great. Come on, Nick, come on. You know they don't use those muscles. Go there. This is very heavy. Alright, look at that. Do you see that thing? Look at it. Nick: 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 cut. Nick: Wheels to the elevator. I'd say it's probably for the best. Thanks, Vinnie. Oh. You are welcome.

Oh, now, let me tell you, this was not easy to bring. What you are seeing here is a Parmigiano Reggiano straight from my homeland, Italy. And you know, it's funny. I've been trying to install this for weeks. Even months. But the first time it was damaged during transportation and I have no idea what that means. All I know is that I received a notification when I was on my way that something had happened halfway there. Maybe someone decided they loved cheese and dropped it on purpose so they could take it home. But the important thing is that it is already here.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about this before we get into the details. But the first thing I want to say, because I have to say it, is that it smells amazing. Oh God. There's something really cool about a

parmesan

wheel

like this. The first thing we see around the side is Parmigiano-Reggiano. But there are more specific details that we can address that are quite interesting. This big seal here is just a quality seal where the number right above it tells us the farm it comes from in Italy. I love that you can trace it back to that very place.

Here is a seal from the manufacturer itself that we can remove with one of our small parmesan knives. Now, if I spin the wheel, there's something right here, you'll see it, says the cinematographer. This stands for Denominazione di Origine Protetta, which means protected designation of origin. Italians don't play with cheese. So what the DOP tells us actually comes from Italian law. Kind of like champagne that comes only from champagne, France. This shows that it is legitimate Parmesan, that is, from Parma, Reggio Emilia or Bologna. The last you can see I turn it around is February 19th.

Like good wine. The longer Parmesan is aged, the more enjoyable it tends to be. This wheel here has been aged for 24 months and you can actually sell Parmesan cheese before it has been aged at least 12 months. This is a pretty good parmesan cheese wheel. Let me put it this way. I have nothing left in my piggy bank after this one. Alright. So this is how it's going to be. We are making dough inside this wheel. But first we have to cut it in half. So let's cut it like this. I want to show you these two knives because this will be the first knife I will use.

And I thought I'd show this in comparison to this. The knife that I normally use in the videos, we don't actually need my regular chef's knife. So I can put this aside. Now, to start, we're going to take this nice knife here and score the whole wheel of parmesan. What's really cool is that they give us a line right down the middle to make this score perfectly. For now, I'm just trying to get that opening line. I'm going to pick it up again to get a deeper line, but for now, this is all I need. Once I've got this nice liner on the cheese, I'll take the back corner of the knife instead of the top, which will allow me to go a little deeper here and slowly come back to further solidify that line. .

Now I'm basically starting to dig deeper into the cheese itself to get to the Rhine, which we have to cross, because it's a very beautiful piece of cheese. I'm really trying to do it justice here with nice clean cuts. Now we have another knife that we will use here. If you can see it up close. It has a very strange shape, very specific to a cheese like this. And here you have this extremely sharp knife tip. Basically, I'm going to push it into my cheese and then pull really hard to start cutting through the rind. This passes like a breeze.

And you can see that when I take it like this, the peel comes out a little bit. Now we have these tools that are basically wedges that go into the side of the cheese to open it up. This for me is the part I look forward to the most. I think it will be satisfying to finally have that cheese popsicle. We'll pick an area right to the side of the cheese and wedge it all the way in and as we go we'll go back and forth a little bit to start breaking up the cheese. Once it's in, I'll put it back a little bit, turn the cheese wheel, and go to a space a little higher up.

The same here. I put it all the way in, moving it around to break up the cheese and then bring it back in. Now I will turn the cheese to the other side and place another one, moving it back and forth to open the cheese. Then I'll remove the first wedge, spin the wheel again, and go in at the opposite end. This right here is an arm exercise I could never have imagined. And I'll repeat this process until the wheel starts to feel a little looser, at which point it's basically going to break. I'm not kidding when I say this is actually a really good arm exercise.

And I used to go to the gym quite a bit, but I have practically not done so since Covid started. Now, to try to finish things up here and open up this wheel, I'm going to move all of those levers closer together and start lifting them up and pushing them up to see if it's going to happen. I'm not willing to go yet. He tells me that there are probably some spots that haven't been touched on here yet, so I'm going to work a little more with some of these shims on the edges. Now, I've gone all the way around the wheel with these chocks and I think we're ready to explode.

Oh wait. That? All that hard work has paid off. When you open it like that, you get these beautiful flakes of cheese, this beautiful almost crystalline piece that you got here. You just can't get it any other way. Opening a wheel of parmesan by hand is truly something special. I know I've already had a few bites, but I have to try this cheese while it's this fresh, because I don't know how many times in my life I'm going to eat cheese this fresh. That cheese has more Parmesan flavor than I knew Parmesan could have. There are almost these little crunchy glass flakes when you bite into it, and it's very smooth and cheesy and creamy.

Without a doubt the most amazing parmesan I have ever tasted. But of course, we are going to fill all this 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 just in my bowl where I'm going to put the yolks. I'm going to add a little bit of olive oil because I don't want those yolks to stick to the bowl. I want them all nice and whole in this bowl, I'll crack the eggs and then gently drop in the whites with the shells, which I can save for later.

With them you will obtain a rich and tasty tortilla. As for these beautiful yolks, I will carefully place them all in the bowl with the olive oil. I will repeat this process very carefully with the 12 egg yolks, trying to keep them whole and intact. There's nothing like making beautiful handmade pasta dough with fresh, intact egg yolks. All of you who are subscribed to our channel probably remember that time we made cured egg yolks and we only had 12 yolks left, but one broke and we had 11 left. This time I'm going to try to keep every single egg yolk fresh. and intact.

Now on our cutting board, we're going to put a little over two cups of all-purpose flour in the middle of the flour. We will make a small well and then in that well we will go our 12 beautiful egg yolks. If we want we can add just a little bit of olive oil here. And then we break in those egg yolks. What a satisfying thing to do. Slowly bring that flower from outside to incorporate it into the yolks, mixing gently and gradually until everything is well combined. At this point in the process, I usually like to bring my bench scraper, which allows me to easily put everything together.

Now we work with our dough and after a little effort, but nothing as bad as opening that wheel of parmesan. We are left with a nice disk of pasta dough. At this point, I'm going to take my ridiculously large plastic wrap and leave it in the refrigerator for half an hour while our dough is in the refrigerator. I want to take a few moments to talk to you about today's sponsor, HelloFresh. This is America's number one meal kit. Forget the supermarket, you'll get kits you can use with fresh ingredients to make perfectly portioned meals. Personally, I purchased HelloFresh because of my commitment to eating more sustainably this year.

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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 enter that code. I've never met anyone who turns down free food, so go to the description and check it out. And many thanks to HelloFresh for being today's sponsor. Let's go back to our parmesan wheel and finish that pasta. First we're going to cut that wheel of parmesan because we want to make sure we have a nice bowl. In fact, maybe I can use some of these chunks, which will allow me to get some nice chunks of Parmesan out of here.

I love these rustic looking chunks coming out of the cheese. Just look at how beautiful they are. I feel like I'm handling gold once I've extracted so much 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 left here and then gradually start carving the shape with my spoon. If I can get it into the perfect bowl shape, it will 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 the entire wheel.

I suppose you can get hundreds and hundreds of servings of cheese out of this whole wheel. And when I say portion, I mean those huge chunks could be in the 1000 range with the size of this thing. And once we have created a nice bowl, we can set the wheel aside. Now that our dough has been sitting in the refrigerator for a while, I first want to show you how bright and yellow this stuff is. That's what you get when you use all the egg yolks. Now first we are going to spread this dough with a little flour.

Really making sure that doesn't stick to a bunch of things. Then we'll take the same bench scraper we used before and cut it in half. Press the dough until it's nice and thin, blooming a little as you go, and optionally use a rolling pin to push it even further. Once it's ready, push it through your pasta maker. We should get a beautiful, nice, soft yellow dough. And as I think I've mentioned before, I always like to fold it and go through it a second time to eliminate any air bubbles. Once the dough is rolled out for the first time, turn up the dial and start rolling it out on a thinner setting until you are ready to make the fettuccine.

Once finished, we can spread our fettuccine. Now we spread the fettuccine, creating these beautiful strands of pasta. Now we're going to make a really quick garlic cream sauce. And then we're almost ready to stuff that Parmesan cheese. So don't go anywhere. We cut each of the heads of garlic for our garlic cream sauce. I'll add a stick of butter and let it melt. Once the butter melts, I'll take a few cloves of fresh garlic and press them in here. Holy oh. I'll take a garlic press over chopping garlic any day, because it really saves you from all those nasty-smelling cutting boards and dishes.

Now, into this butter, I'm going to slowly sprinkle a few tablespoons of flour while still whisking, and this will make us a nice garlic roux. Those lumps you see there aren't flour, they're actually just minced garlic. Once we've stirred this a little bit and let it thicken, I'll add about two cups of heavy cream. And then once I've let this start to heat up, I'll start adding some parmesan right from my wheel. Can you imagine if I had the nerve to use grated parmesan now?same from the store? Think of it this way. You can buy fresh parmesan.

That was at least recently taken out of a whole parmesan wheel, as I've shown you. Or you can buy grated parmesan, which has probably been on the shelf for a few years, but hasn't exactly aged in a good way. Just think that the next time you make that decision it will be on your conscience, not mine. Once this thickens into a really beautiful buttery cream sauce, we can set all of this aside and we are ready to cook our pasta. Once the water is boiling, we'll salt it like it's the ocean because we really want that salty flavor in our pasta.

And once the salt has had a minute to settle and dissolve in the water, we'll add our pasta. Now, before putting that pasta, we will add a little white wine and set it on fire. You may not be able to see the flame right now, but you can probably hear it. And there's tons of heat coming out of this parmesan wheel right now. You can probably start to see some of these flames from the fire, which are a little faint but they're definitely still there. But what it allows me to do is make a cheese sauce with this before I even add the pasta.

And because it's so hot there, the cheese starts to melt at the base of my wheel. Now that my eyes are watering again and crying a little from all that alcohol that just came off, we have this really warm cheese spread on the base that we can now use to make. From our pasta, we will pour that pasta, which of course we need to separate a little bit here. Then we'll go in with that heavy cream sauce. Letting it sit for all that pasta. And at this point, I'm going to take my forks and mix all of this together to make our beautiful pasta inside that parmesan wheel.

I have to say, this is one of the most beautiful, cool, rustic things I've ever seen in the kitchen. And I have cooked many things in my life. Just listen to that pasta sound. Just for a little color. I'm going to finish this off with some chives before I dive in. I'm just going to add a little more parmesan right on top, because you can never have too much parmesan. It's time to take a little bite. Nick. Vinny: Yeah, buddy, 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: Do you want some pasta? Vinny: Oh wow. Alright. Nick: You know what? Vinny will try it before me. Vinny: You know what? I'm in. I hope this is good. Nick: It's delicious, like fresh pasta. Vinny: Wow. I think my taste buds are dancing with the stars. Alright? If that is. That's very good, sir. Fairly good. Yes. Well, me too. Nick: Am I good in the cart? Vinny: No. Yes, yes. Oh yeah. Dude, that's fucking fire. Nick: Now we can't eat anything with cheese before we let our little furry friend try it himself.

So I'm going to put pesto. And don't worry, this will be hygienic enough. Then I'm going to scrape this part of the cheese off. The funny thing is that I think he will just eat the cheese and not the pasta. And that's okay because there is too much garlic in the pasta. But this is probably one of the best days of Pesto's life. Pesto. Say goodbye to everyone. Okay, but now I think it's time to dive in. Let's try it. There's some good pasta. Honestly, I even have a hard time describing it. This is all so, so fresh.

I feel like it doesn't get any cooler than this. I mean, sure, I can take a trip to Italy next time and get the wheel straight from the cheesemonger in some lovely basement where they've been aging it for a while, and that would be a little fresher. But I mean, this is pretty new. One thing you might be able to see when I bring the pasta closer is how well our beautiful cream sauce adheres to the pasta. The good thing about this is that we have achieved the consistency of that cream sauce. That garlic it contains is perfect but it is pleasant and subtle.

The pasta is perfectly smooth and has that light egg yolk flavor with that fatty, rich and creamy texture that we look for in a pasta. While the whole parmesan wheel eating experience elevates everything in every way, a big part of tasting and enjoying food comes from smell, and sitting in front of a parmesan wheel like this means you're smelling all that cheese. on the outside of the wheel. Seriously, this is corny. Just looking at this beautiful half wheel is so, so special. Now before we wrap up, I just want to thank you so much for watching.

You guys are the reason I can get stuff like this and make videos like this. And there's a lot more to come where that came from. All you have to do is make sure you give the video a like and a comment there, which helps a lot. Let's try to get this one over 100,000 likes, why not? And in the meantime, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the notifications icon. I have a lot of cheese left to finish.