Pasta

Today I am going to share with you something that we love to do: making our own pasta! Making your own pasta sounds crazy, right? It probably takes too much time and makes too much of a mess and is generally not worth the trouble. And yet it doesn't take too much time, or make too much of a mess, and is usually worth any trouble it causes. 

The basic recipe I am using here comes from an excellent book by Aliza Green, Making Artisan Pasta. If you want to know more about making your own pasta, I highly recommend this book. The author goes into great detail about proportions, ingredients, types of flour, temperatures, kneading techniques, and the best recipes for doing everything by hand, or with a stand mixer and machine roller, or even a food processor and extruder. She also provides quite a few recipes for sauces, flavored doughs (her roasted red pepper pasta is really fun to make!), formed pastas like gnocchi and garganelli, and even asian-style noodles. The book also has a lot of helpful pictures. This particular recipe is intended for those using a stand mixer and machine roller. 

You start off with some water, eggs, and flour. They must all, and this is important, be at room temperature. This particular recipe requires 350g of flour (you can use all-purpose, 00, or a mix of all-purpose, durum, and semolina), 3 large eggs, 1 egg yolk, and 2-3 tablespoons of tap water.

Things are easier if you put all of your ingredients together before you start cooking. This goes for anything--not just pasta.

Toss the flour into the mixer at low speed, adding the eggs and yolk until the dough starts coming together into big crumbs. Begin adding water one tablespoon at a time until the crumbs look a little moist like below. Eventually, the dough will pull completely away from the sides and be wrapped around the paddle. It will still be a little crumbly, and that is okay.

Once your dough has come together and wrapped around the paddle, it is time to apply some elbow grease. Now is the time to get out all of your frustrations from the week while putting love into the dough. Never let stress actually get into the food. I know that this sounds strange, but every time that either one of us has gotten stressed out while cooking, the food comes out a little funny. Put love into your food. Throw some flour onto your, preferably, wood surface and start kneading your dough for about five minutes. It should come completely together and be pretty smooth. If you are using semolina, it will still feel a little grainy. 

Granite isn't the best surface for kneading pasta dough because it tends to be cold, but we've learned that cooking doesn't always require perfection.

Wrap it up in plastic wrap or cover it with a wet tea towel and let it rest for thirty minutes. This step allows for the dough to completely soak in all of the liquid, which needs to happen unless you want to have pasta dough that cracks and breaks when you roll it out. Learn from our mistakes, because we've definitely tried to get around this by just adding a little more water and immediately rolling out the dough. It was not pretty. Don't do it. Let your dough rest.

This is our roller. You can, of course, roll the dough out by hand, or with a roller attached to a stand mixer. I find that a hand-crank sheeter is less work than doing it by hand and way more enjoyable than using a motor-powered one.

At this point, your dough should be firm and perfect for rolling. Cut the dough ball into four pieces. You will only be working on one section at a time, so you need to leave the sections you are not rolling out covered. If you don't keep them covered, they will dry out and be more difficult to roll. Shape the section into a rather thick rectangle and roll it out on levels 0 and 1 until it seems that the dough is not getting any thinner with each pass. At this point, shape it back into a rectangle again, making sure that it is somewhat even throughout. If the dough is too springy (i.e. it doesn't seem to flatten out much because it keeps springing back into a thick rectangle), you need to let it rest a little more before rolling again. Now, I think that there is a trick to rolling out dough. You must do it slowly, deliberately, and evenly. Do it too quickly and you risk breaking the sheet or having a rather uneven sheet of dough. 

You can see here that the dough is fairly thick on the first few passes.

From here on out, it is pretty self-explanatory. You pass the dough through the roller once at each level (starting back again at 0) until you get to about 7 or 8 depending on your roller and the type of pasta you are making. We are making fettuccine, so we went up to 7. If your dough becomes unruly or really misshapen, just reform it and sprinkle on a little bit of flour. Don't overdo it with the flour or your dough could become crazy dry. That is a bad thing. 

You can see here the texture of the dough as it gets rolled out. It is fairly smooth.

You don't have to hold the dough that is getting fed through the roller because it usually feeds through pretty smoothly. As you can see here, Mark is only holding onto the pasta that is coming out of the sheeter to keep it from folding in on itself and sticking together. 

Technically, we should be handling the dough a little bit more like pizza dough. You can see that my fingers are showing through the pasta sheet, which could potentially break it. I wasn't too worried, but usually I am a bit more careful and use the back of my hand to hold the dough. 

Eventually your dough will get rather long. Remember that this is only a quarter of the dough--imagine what it would like if you tried to do the whole batch of dough in one sheet! This is a finished sheet of pasta:

Cut the now absurdly long pasta sheet into two or three sections and then run each section through a pasta cutter, or use a pastry wheel to cut your pasta into strips. Of course, you could also drop some filling on top of one of the sheets, cover it with another sheet, pinch everything down and cut it into raviolis, whatever floats your boat.

Let it dry (except for the ravioli...cook the ravioli as you go). We have a pasta drying rack, but you can take two cereal boxes, cut a few notches into them and put skewers in the notches to create your own drying rack. Alternatively, put the noodles on some parchment paper, sprinkle them with flour, and let them stand for a few minutes. Then, flip the noodles over onto another sheet of parchment paper, sprinkle with flour and allow this side to dry. Let them dry fully so that mold doesn't grow on your pasta if you decide to store some of it instead of cook it immediately. Do it all over again with the other sections of dough you have left until it is all rolled, cut, and drying. It doesn't have to be completely dry if you are going to cook it immediately, but try to cook the noodles in batches so that drier noodles cook separately from the fresher ones. This way, you don't get a batch that has some perfect, al dente noodles mixed with underdone or overdone ones. Yuck.

Now you can cook your pasta! The water you use should be salty, like the sea. Seriously, there is no salt in the dough so you need to cook it in salty water. It only takes four or five minutes to cook fresh pasta, and it is especially delicious al dente. You can always coat the pasta in some extra-virgin olive oil and freshly-ground pepper if you don't have a lot of time or energy. We made a quick sauce by melting some freshly-grated parmesan in butter. If you have a little more time, you can take some whole San Marzano tomatoes and crush them by hand in a large bowl (or you could just get crushed tomatoes--that's fine, too). Throw them into a pot, add some sugar, salt, garlic, pepper, basil, wine, and any other herbs and spices you want. Bring the mixture to a boil and then let it simmer until it has reduced a bit and tastes just like you want it too. When using canned tomatoes, you really need to use sugar. For a 28 oz. can of tomatoes, I probably add about 1-2 tablespoons of sugar. Some people use more, others use less--just taste as you go. Pasta is great because it can be a blank canvas. Add some spinach in your dough to flavor it, and it becomes completely transformed. Add a different sauce and some shrimp, and you get something completely different. Throw in some veggies and cheese, and you get something different again. The pastabilities possibilities with pasta are endless.

The finished product, cooked and coated with sauce!

With two people in the kitchen, the entire process takes about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. That includes the rest time for the dough, during which you can start the sauce, wipe down the counter, and clean the few dishes you have used to prepare your ingredients. You should even have some time to rest--or start a salad or prepare lunches for the week. It also seems to me like this would be really fun to do with kids. What kid wouldn't have a lot of fun crushing the tomatoes for sauce, rolling out a sheet of pasta, or making ravioli?

Remember, you don't need any fancy equipment to make this. You could use a bowl, a fork, and your hands to mix the dough, a wooden rolling pin to roll it out, and a knife to cut the pasta. Pretty much every tool we use to make pasta was given to us as a gift for our wedding--from the stand mixer to the pasta sheeter, book, and drying rack--so we are lucky to have it and love using it. We just don't want you to decide against making your own pasta because you think you need all of this to make it.

I hope you enjoyed learning about one of our favorite things to do together!