Arthur Cavaliere speaks with quick confidence, likes to have fun and shoot the sh*t while he’s cooking, and is full of “crazy good tricks.” He might have made a pretty good lawyer, except that he dropped out of law school to let cooking take over his life, working in one high-profile kitchen after another (El Vez, Amada, and Parc, to name a few). Now he’s got a place of his own, In Riva, doing “southern-Italian with a lot of French technique” down by the Schuylkill in East Falls. He’s a barrel of culinary knowledge and experience, but on this day he visited COOK simply to get us into the basics of making and serving fresh pastas.

You start, of course, with the dough, which is simple to make with a good recipe and a little practice:

1,000 grams of 00 pizza flour; 295 grams whole eggs; 295 grams egg yolk; 29 grams extra-virgin olive oil. KitchenAid. Dough hook. Six minutes. Hand-knead into a ball. Rest cold 20 minutes.

“You can feel how pliable it is,” said Cavaliere, passing around balls of the finished dough. “Pleasantly tacky to the touch, but not sticky.”

If you want to jazz things up, you can make a colored pasta by replacing some of the egg with an equal amount of some intensely colorful ingredient, like spinach, beets, squid ink, or saffron. You could also just laminate in some pretty speckles, like cracked black pepper or a green herb. “Mint chiffonade works really well,” says Cavaliere, “It blanches to a beautiful bright green.” I expect that would go nicely with spring peas; or until they arrive, lamb.

Rolling out the dough is fun, but it does require some finesse. Things quickly get tricky as your six-inch chunk of dough stretches to an unwieldy six feet between the steel rollers of the hand-cranked pasta sheeter. “Drape it on the edges of your hands, not your palms, to keep it from warming and softening too quickly,” Cavaliere suggested helpfully, “and when you’re halfway down, fold it in four and start again, to build tensile strength.” The thickness is up to you; maybe a bit thicker for spaghetti and similar strands; fairly thin for stuffed pastas, “So you can see your fingers through it.”

Tools for cutting and shaping pasta can be as simple or specific as you like. The basics are a pizza cutter, a sharp knife, and your hands, but you can buy all sorts of fancy wheels, crimpers, stamps, molds, and cutters. A ruffled wheel is handy for making pretty fluted edges, and the cutter attachment on the sheeter does the trick for simple spaghetti and tagliatelle. And while you can just eyeball things, the In Riva crew uses precisely cut pieces of wood as cutting guides to ensure perfect consistency. Maybe it was their penciled-on labels (“Garganelli, Fiondette — Do Not Remove From Kitchen!”) but these reminded me of the platinum-iridium alloy bar kept at the headquarters of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, once used as the official scientific standard for the length of one meter (in case anyone needed to know). In restaurant-ing, as in science, consistency is key, and people notice it.

We rolled squares around pencils to shape garganelli, pinched a few farfalle, cut pappardelle with the special guide wood, and sent sheets of dough through the tag cutter—but if you really want to show some love for your dinner guests, it’s worth spending the time and effort to make one of Italy’s many stuffed pastas. Cavaliere led us through cappellacci, tortelloni, agnolotti, candele, mezzaluna, and doppio—pope’s hats, little pies, “rings,” candles, half-moons, and “doubles.” The Italians have the charming custom of naming their pastas rather descriptively, sometimes very literally. If they look like little radiators, they’re radatori. Bellybutton-like shapes are umbellico. And fiondette are named after fionda, the slings once used to hurl rocks at medieval enemies, but these days more likely to hurl mushroom ragú into your mouth. Pappardelle comes from the verb “to gobble up,” which I think is pretty spot-on. Garganelli has a slightly grotesque origin, so please google it yourself.

Each type of stuffed pasta probably has its own traditional filling, but basically you can use anything you want, as long as it’s delicious. Cavaliere brought four fillings for us to play with: Truffled Green Peas, Lemon-Scented Ricotta, Butternut Squash with Orange & Nutmeg, and Beets with Caraway. The filling should also be dry enough that it handles easily and stays inside the pasta when it’s cooked. Ricotta may need to be drained, and pea puree may need firming with a little gelatin, since frozen peas contain a lot of water. (Yes, every restaurant on the planet uses frozen peas. Get over it, they’re fine.) One of the most interesting stuffed pastas is filled with a ring of ricotta around a fresh egg yolk, which gently thickens to become its own oozy sauce. I can imagine involving truffles in that, too (and sadly they’ll probably stay just “imagined,” since I don’t actually have any).

“The sauce for a stuffed pasta should be simple, to let the intensely flavored filling stand out.” As if to prove the point, Cavaliere set down a dish of candele, plump with deeply magenta-hued, caraway-scented beets, glistening in nothing but a bit of golden butter and olive oil. I ate three in a row.

One of the best ways to eat pasta, by the way, is as Cacio e Pepe (“with cheese and pepper”). “This is one of our back-of-the-house favorites,” says Cavaliere enthusiastically. “Just pasta, cheese, butter, and black pepper.” It’s so typical of kitchens: They cook all sorts of sophisticated stuff, but at the end the day they go for things that are simple, hearty, and just plain good.

Pasta has its classics, but it’s also flexible and amenable to new inspirations. I took my pappardelle home and fancied it up with a bunch of leftovers from the fridge—smoked trout, kabocha pumpkin, fresh dill from the struggling window box, and some warm lemon yogurt left over the previous night’s Indian experiments. Unorthodox, yes, but I tell you it was good! Pasta is not exactly a free-for-all, but it does make a fine venue for all sorts of culinary shenanigans. We’d best head down to In Riva to see what Chef Cavaliere has up his sleeve next!