handmade pasta

handmade pasta

It’s easy to buy pasta. So many varieties, rather inexpensive, and it keeps near indefinitely. Making pasta by hand is not something that crosses everyones’ mind when planning dinner. Even so it’s a basic kitchen skill, only needs dos ingredients, and is satisfying to make from scratch. So let’s get to it!

The general idea seems to be about 100 grams of flour to 1 egg, which makes just about a 1 person serving. So if you have 3 people, 300 grams of flour and 3 eggs is easy as math!

Sift the flour into a bowl (or pour it into a bowl and cheat-sift after with a whisk). Make a well in the middle of your flour and crack your egg(s) in there. Using either a fork or a whisk, mix the egg up and slowly start pulling the flour together from the sides. There are a lot of people that do this right on their work surface with the flour well, but it can turn into a mess real quick if the wall of flour surrounding the egg gets messed up, so hey I dig the bowl approach.

When you get all the flour mixed in into a ball, you’ll notice it doesn’t come together very nicely. It’s flaky and hard. So to make nice, smooth pasta, the idea is to fold the dough on itself and flatten it down a number of times. There’s a couple of ways of doing this. If you are into pasta all the time, a pasta machine of some kind might work for you. But if you only want to do this occasionally, just use a rolling pin. Roll it out as best you can (as thin as you can) then fold it in half, half again, and repeat. Do that 5 or 7 times until it’s very smooth, the last time, to get it very thin, follow this trick:

Roll the ball out roughly into a circle, then roll the dough around your rolling pin. With the dough rolled around the pin, rock it back and forth while pulling the dough out from the center towards the outsides of the rolling pin. You can get it really thin this way. Lastly, you have to cut the dough. Nothing fancy required since you can just use a knife. Take a look: