Buckwheat Pasta with Chicken Sauce

PASTA

1. Mix all the dough ingredients together in a bowl. The dough will be shaggy and seemingly too dry at first. Keep kneading it until it comes together, about 5 minutes. To hydrate the dough, either wrap it in plastic and set it on the counter for 1 hour, or vacuum seal it, which will hydrate it instantly.
2. Cut off about a third of the dough. Keep the rest covered so it doesn't dry out. Press the piece flat and run it through a pasta roller. You'll want to roll it through, fold it over, and roll it through several times to laminate the dough, which will strengthen it. Ultimately you want a rectangle. Then run it through the roller on progressively thinner settings until you get to no. 6 on the Atlas, which is about 1/16th of an inch. Thin, but not gossamer thin.
3. Cut the sheet of pasta into long rectangles about 2 inches wide. I use the fluted pasta cutter for this. Then cut each strip into squares. Cut each square in half diagonally to make triangles. Again, the fluted cutter makes these pretty.
4. Set the finished blecs on a baking sheet dusted with flour and repeat with the rest of the dough. The pasta can sit out for a few hours at this point. You could also air dry it completely by spreading it out so the pieces don't touch each other on a table. This will take a day or two.

SAUCE

1. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Heat the olive oil in a large. lidded pot like a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Brown the meat well on all sides, salting as it cooks. Take your time with this, because the browning is the main source of flavor here. Remove the pieces of chicken, pheasant or whatever as they brown and set aside.
2. Add the sliced onion to the pot and brown this really well, too. Stir around a bit at first so the moisture of the onions picks up the stuck-on, browned bits in the pot. Then let the onions sit still until they start to leave some browned bits on the bottom. This second layer of browned goodness is another key to the flavor.
3. When the onions are well browned, pour in the beer and use a wooden spoon to scrape off all the browned bits. Add the mushrooms, if using, the sage, and the meat, along with all the juices that collected in the bowl you put them in. Cover all this with just enough water to cover the meat, put the lid on the pot. Set the pot in the oven and let it cook until the meat is tender, anywhere from 45 minutes for a store-bought chicken to several hours for an old pheasant.
4. Once the meat is tender, pull it all out of the pot. Set the pot on the stovetop and start simmering it down to thicken. Remove all the meat from the bones and return it to the pot. Cook this down, uncovered, until it's thick and sauce-like, not stewy. Only now do you add more salt and pepper. I like to finish this sauce with another drizzle of olive oil, but you might not need that if you used a fat chicken.
5. Stir in the chopped parsley.

TO FINISH

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add enough salt to make it taste like the sea. Boil the pasta for 3 minutes, or until it's tender, but still has a little bite to it.
2. Put some of the sauce in a large bowl and add the pasta. toss to combine. Serve with some grated pecorino cheese and some more black pepper.