Homemade Pasta
I love making homemade pasta. Aside from the unparalleled flavor you get from the end product, it’s the process that makes it worth doing. After a full day in front of screens it’s a nice change of pace to use your hands and get a bit messy. Pasta dough is one of the most pleasing doughs to work with and also one of the simplest. Just flour and eggs, a pinch of salt and a bit of elbow grease and you’ve got yourself something special. The transition from shaggy clumpy flour to smooth, golden, pliable dough is magic. It becomes so springy and supple, almost like play-doh, but with a gorgeous golden hue from the egg yolks.
Okay, enough pasta poetry, let’s get down to the recipe and method.
Ingredients
(for 2-3 portions, multiply as needed)
1 cup flour (all-purpose or “00” flour or a blend)
1 whole egg
1 egg yolk
1 pinch salt
Let’s talk flour for a second. I referred to the Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza & Calzone book to choose the right flour (shoutout to my dear friend Laura who gave this to me as a birthday gift). It turns out that commercial pasta is commonly made from semolina flour since semolina flour is harder (higher protein content) and thus will make a stronger, fast-drying pasta. Other options like all-purpose flour or “00” (doppio zero in Italian, which refers to how finely ground the flour is) use a combination of hard and soft wheat and therefore will make a softer, silkier, more tender pasta. From the book:
Very different pasta doughs can be made from these flours, singly or in combination. The basic dough, made with all-purpose flour and rolled very thin, is fine textured, very delicate, and light. It is particularly well suited to cream sauces, and makes excellent ravioli and lasagne.
That’s all I needed to hear since I’m making Alfredo with this batch of pasta. The takeaway here is that for a heartier, toothier pasta you can blend in semolina with your all-purpose or “00” flour. Or, use semolina entirely if you want to make pasta ahead and let it dry for use later. For silky soft noodles, stick with AP or look for “00” in your grocery or an Italian market.
Method
Start with your flour in a big pile. You can work straight on a countertop or, if you’re pressed for counter space like me, in a big bowl. Just make sure you have lots of room to work with.
Create a well in the center and add your eggs and yolks. For my dough I used 2 cups AP, 1 cup “00”, 3 eggs + 2 yolks and ended up with about 9 portions.
Three cups of flour, three whole eggs and two extra yolks. A pinch of salt and plenty of room to work in this big bowl.
With a fork, scramble the eggs and then, once blended, start incorporating the flour bit by bit. Once it begins to clump and it becomes difficult to use the fork effectively, the fun begins. Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty!
It’s just like making scrambled eggs except it’s totally different.
You want to incorporate all of the egg and flour. To do this, just start kneading the dough. I like to use the heel of my hand to push the dough away from me, almost scraping it to create more surface area and thus more opportunities to uncover wet or dry pockets. You’ll have to work the dough for quite a while until it’s smooth and the flour is evenly hydrated. This may take 5 or 10 minutes. For me, it took two Vitamin String Quartet songs and half of A Tribe Called Quest’s Can I Kick It? before I had an even golden color and all the flour was completely incorporated.
Can I knead it? (Yes, you can!) Can I knead it? (Yes, you can!) Can I knead it? (Yes, you can!) And I’m dough!
NB: Since the size of your eggs may vary, sometimes you need to add a splash of water to fully hydrate the flour. However, avoid doing this if you can. In my experience, even if it looks like it’ll never incorporate, if you keep working the dough it will eventually come together uniformly. The worse thing you can do is end up with a wet sticky dough that will be hard if not impossible to roll out.
When kneading is done it won’t necessarily look perfect and finished. The dough needs to rest and relax. In 20 minutes it’ll look gaawgeous dahling, I promise.
At this point, the dough will still be a bit tough to work with and that’s okay. It needs a rest to loosen up. After all, we just gave it quite a workout. Wrap the dough ball tightly in plastic wrap so it won’t form a skin, and pop it in the fridge for 20-30 minutes while you take a break, have a glass of wine, or prep other ingredients.
Once the dough has had a chance to rest it’s ready to roll out. When you unwrap the dough you’ll notice the difference immediately. It should be softer, smoother and more pleasing to handle. Cut off a small section to roll out and rewrap the rest so you don’t dry out your dough and form a skin.
I told you it would look perfect after it had a rest.
To roll out the pasta I used the Deluxe Atlas Pasta Queen (badass name, am I right?!?) that I stole from my parents when I found out they had it storage for about 100 years and used it maybe once. This thing is the tops, let me tell you. If you don’t have a pasta machine like this one you can use a rolling pin like my nonna used to*, but you’ll need that sought after ample counter space I talked about earlier.
*I am not Italian and I do not have a nonna.
Spaghetti, ravioli, lasagna, fettuccine, noodles, the Deluxe Atlas Pasta Queen does it all! And it’s the only pasta machine I use! thumbs up (Psst, Marcato Himark, contact me for sponsorship opportunities.)
Starting on the widest setting, run the dough through a few times folding it back on itself between rolls to get it into a nice shape. You want a relatively even rectangle when you start in order to end up with a nice sheet at the end.
Run the dough through the next, slightly narrower, setting twice to press it thinner. The first time thins out the dough and the second time will even it out. Or something like that, maybe just do it once, I dunno. I’ve always done it this way. After two run throughs, adjust the setting lower again, and run through twice more repeating this step until you’ve run the dough through the thinnest setting.
Rolling is fun because the dough is stretchy. Rolling is also stressful because sometimes it starts feeding in at an angle and you think everything will be ruined. It won’t.
At this point you should have a long, newspaper-thin rectangle of dough. I had to ask my girlfriend to help me wrangle the sheet through the last couple of settings. On future sheets I cut it in half partway through, before it got too long to handle on my own.
Take your thin pasta sheet and lay it flat on the counter. Sprinkle it with flour and roll it up so you can easily slice it into noodles. Repeat rolling and slicing until you’ve used up all the dough.
Extra flour keeps the dough from sticking to itself and is critical for this step.
I was aiming for fettuccine but I sliced too thin and ended up with pappardelle. I’m not complaining, worse things have happened…
I ended up with about 9 portions of pasta. The Alfredo sauce turned out beautifully but I’ll save that for another post.
Making pasta is one of those kitchen jobs that is better done with friends, but if you find yourself, like me, rolling out pasta at 11pm on a weeknight after work and class, just make sure you’ve got some good tunes going in the kitchen. I bet you that by the time your favorite song comes on and you’re rolling out your third sheet, you’ll get into that groove where the pleasing monotony of the task becomes a joy and there’s nothing else you’d rather be doing.
Or just used the boxed stuff, I’ll never know.