Whole Grain Chipotle-Adobo Noodles

Since I began milling my own flour, I'm enjoying experimenting with all sorts of strange additions. These came out with a pleasant spicy flavor, but no significant heat (Disclaimer: I'm from Texas).

Start with a 10 oz mix of wheat of your choice (or even a single kind if you don't have a variety). Mill it to the finest grind your mill allows (I use the stone wheels on my Retsel).

I used:

• 5 oz durum wheat
• 2.5 oz hard red wheat
• 2.5 oz hard white wheat,

To the ground wheat I added:

• 1/4 teaspoon chipotle chile powder
• 1/4 teaspoon ancho chile powder
• 1/4 teaspoon smoked Spanish paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon ground annato powder

(We'll deal with the adobo chipotle in the next step, don't put it in the flour!)

In a blender, I combined

• 2 room temperature eggs
• 1 chipotle pepper (from a can of chipotles in adobo sauce)
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon olive oil

Pour this into the mound of flour and began working it in. Add warm water as necessary. Overall I added probably 2 tablespoons of warm water as I worked everything into a cohesive whole, then kneaded by hand for 12 minutes. The dough was really, really stiff.

Let the dough rest for 3 hours.

I rolled it out to spaghetti thickness and cut it using the small cutter on my Atlas pasta mill, then hung the noodles to dry. I like to let them hang at least an hour.

If you want to use them to make what you see in the picture:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

While the noodles hung to dry, I had three thick-cut pork chops to which I'd applied a dry rub that morning. They were cut into cubes and browned in a mix of olive oil and butter. After the were nicely browned, I dumped the following into the pan on top:

• 8 oz. sliced mushrooms
• Diced red, yellow and orange sweet peppers (1 large ea)
• 1 diced onion
• 3 finely diced cloves garlic

This cooked down on the stovetop for 20 minutes. I stirred in

• 8 oz can of tomato paste
• 1 cup of stock (I used chicken because that was what I had open in the fridge. Beef would have been fine, as would vegetable for that matter).
• A pinch of kosher salt and a healthy grind of black pepper

The result was great -- I'd been a little worried that the noodles were going to be too strongly flavored; I didn't want it to taste like chile powder. Apparently my guesses on quantities worked out, because they had an obvious taste without being overwhelming.