Fresh Homemade Pasta (pasta fatta in casa)
Posted on May 7, 2009 05:41:48 AM
Making fresh homemade pasta is not difficult, sure it’s time consuming, but it pays off in the end.
First of all, you’ll need a pasta machine. This from Amazon.co.uk is the pasta machine I have, and it does a decent job. This one from Amazon.com is basically the same.
For the pasta dough. The basic ingredients are: flour, salt, eggs. The proportions are typically: 100g (4/5 cup) flour x 1 egg. This is not a strict rule, actually I wanted to make it more eggy and yellow, so I added a yolk or two.
In the end I used 500g flour ( 1/5 cups), 5 eggs, 3 yolks and a pinch of salt.
Which flour? Some cookbooks get around this problem in a smart way: “pasta flour” they say, or 00 flour (finely grounded wheat flour), which is what you would use in Italy. As 00 flour is not sold in the supermarket, if you don’t want to be ripped off by one of those Italian food delis, I would stick to either strong flour or all-purpose flour.
Now, for experiment’s sake, I made two doughs, one for each kind of flour, and even though the strong flour was a bit harder to work, the results were very good in both cases.
The homemade pasta dough. Sift the flour in a bowl, add the salt and make a well in the middle. Break the eggs straight into it and beat them with a fork. Start circling around (using fingers or fork) and bring in the flour. When you have a kneadable pasta dough, transfer it to the working surface and work it for 10-15 minutes, add some more flour if it’s too wet, or sprinkle it with water if too dry. When it’s elastic and smooth dust it with flour and cover it with clingfilm. Let it rest for 30 minutes.
The preparation. In the meantime, take all the paraphernalia for the staging area. Use a large surface (read table), cover it with a tablecloth and dust it all over with flour. Fix the pasta machine, and leave the flour packet and a knife at hand.
Roll it. Take third of the pasta dough and flatten it as much as you can with your hands. Stick it between the rolls of the pasta machine and start rolling it from less thin to thinner. Pass the dough 4-5 times before changing the settings. This is where you need an extra pair of hands to hold the dough. If you’re planning to make lasagne, make it as thin as possible, a little less if you’re making tagliatelle.
Let it dry. When the strips of pasta have the desired thickness (like the ones in the picture), if you’re making lasagne your job is over, you can let it dry. If you’re making tagliatelle though, don’t go back to the pasta machine yet, let it dry a little bit, let’s say 15 minutes, otherwise it will be all sticky long before hitting the boiling water. When you have your tagliatelle, stretch them out carefully and let them dry completely. If you’re not using all the pasta you can freeze it.