I recently learned how to make homemade pasta, and it’s so easy and absolutely amazing. Hear me out: homemade pasta IS easy and a dinnertime game changer. First off, I did not know you truly need only two ingredients – – flour and eggs. No water, no salt (yes, when you boil it, but not used in the manufacturing phase). I recently had the opportunity, through a friend-of-a-friend (who is now also my friend), to have our family learn how to make pasta when we were all together around Thanksgiving.
My new friend-of-a-friend has metal hand-crank pasta machines, which work best if you have two people. Leaving that informal class, two of my kids actually put the hand-crank pasta makers on their Christmas list. I didn’t, thinking this class was kind of a one-and-done for me.
As mentioned in another story about my new Plustek photo scanner, a client recently sent me a very generous gift card with the only requirement that I spend it 100% on myself. Since I’ve also done that to people who I really wanted them to treat themselves to something that they would like – – not dishwasher detergent or gifts, I took it to heart. So, I bought my amazing photo scanner and decided to buy a pasta attachment for my KitchenAid. This would allow me to operate in solo chef mode, and not require me to find someone else interested in helping. I’m sure the hand-crank press can be operated by a solo person, but not me.
I had a pasta machine from the early 1990s that I now realize is completely different from what I just bought. This older machine was a self-contained, electric one-stop-shop in that it would mix the ingredients and push it out to whatever shape attachment you had on the front, very much like the fuzzy pumper Play-Doh machine from my childhood, that I think I still have around here somewhere.
I researched and found that I could get a knock-off brand attachment for my KitchenAid mixer for about 60% less than the official KitchenAid attachment. I usually go for the real thing, but I wasn’t 100% convinced that I would make pasta more than once, and for the cost of the genuine KitchenAid attachment, we would need to eat a LOT of pasta to reach a payback time.
I was skeptical that I’d be able to successfully re-create what we had made at my friend-of-a-friend’s pasta making night (scroll all the way down for our ravioli photos from that night), but I gave it a try. The recipe is so simple. One cup of flour, and two eggs. That’s it. That. Is. It.
I steamed and disinfected my countertop, and set out to make…a mess. First step is to put the flour in a pile on the countertop, then use your measuring cup to make a well in the center. Crack the eggs in to that well. Then you literally just pick up the flour with a fork and put it on top of the eggs and just keep mixing with the fork until the moisture is pretty much consistent through the flour, at which point you can scrape the counter and work toward rolling it into a ball. Then, in a very relaxing process (unexpected) I just kept kneading it, for maybe 10 minutes, until when you push your finger into the dough, it pops back up. Make sure you have flour available and on the counter to keep the pasta workable and not sticking to anything.
Then I tightly wrapped the ball of pasta in plastic and let it sit for 20 minutes while I set up the attachment on my mixer. I had never actually used whatever it was that was hiding behind the silver plate on the front top of my KitchenAid. Turns out, it’s just like the PTO on the tractor and you’re using the mixer motor to power the attachment. I am learning so many things.
Just like with the manual hand-crank pasta press, the first thing you need to do is get your dough very flat and consistent. If you don’t have a pasta press or you’re not sure you want to get one, I suppose you could use a rolling pin and just get the dough very very flat and then cut the strips with a knife. But I haven’t tried that.
So the process is you cut your ball of dough in half and re-wrap the other half and set aside. Stretch and flatten it with your hands until it gets to be about the size and thickness of a large cookie– –a pretty big cookie, but a cookie.
There’s a thickness setting on the machine – – both a hand-crank machine and a motorized set up. Start with the thickest setting – – on both types of machines I’ve used the thickest setting is 8, and run the flat piece through each setting, twice. Tighten it up a notch and run it through twice at setting at 7, and keep doing that until you get to your desired thickness. Do not be fooled by thickness 4, because the pasta does expand a little in the cooking process, and you want to be able to chew it and enjoy it. I found that number 3 or 2 works for me. If your now large ribbon of pasta that’s probably 5” wide and 2’ long gets unwieldy, cut it in half the short way, because if you’re going to make any kind of noodle like linguine or angel hair, you don’t want each strand to be 2 feet long. Keep tossing the noodles in flour. It won’t absorb, and it will cook off. The concept is you don’t want it to stick together.
You can buy a little tree to hang the noodles onto to dry while you’re working, but I just use cookie cooling racks, which do the same thing.
If you’re thinking that you’ll just make a double batch because if you’re making a mess, you might as well make it once, toss the pasta in flour, throw it in a Ziploc bag, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised when it’s in the freezer for you for a quick dinner.
If you are making the pasta and plan to cook it the same night, I just give it about a half hour to dry a little bit.
When you boil your pasta, you need a good amount of salt in the water – – remember there is no salt in the pasta. This will not result in salty tasting pasta, but it’s needed to level out the flavor.
You can see that I got brave and made lasagna noodles. It was the best lasagna I’ve ever made. I did not cook the noodles before layering them in the lasagna.
You can also see in the photos that we made spinach pasta (I’m not there yet on my own at-home-pasta) and we made homemade ricotta, which was its own version of amazing and I’ve been intimidated to make at home. Also, just 2 ingredients.
If you would like to try making pasta, just reach out, I’m happy to show you. I’ve had a few friends over to walk them through the process and we have a fun time do
