Homemade pasta is worth the effort
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- May 7, 2018
- 2898
This will no doubt bring some groans among those who just aren’t going to take the time to fool with it, but we’ve been making fresh pasta at my house for the last few months and wouldn’t think of buying the dry stuff at the store since.
Honestly the difference in the final product isn’t life-changing. The process takes a little time and no small amount of counter space to accomplish. It’s also messy, and you’ll likely have to add vacuuming to the cleanup chore list afterward.
It’s also delicious, relatively simple and very satisfying to do. I would add inexpensive, but you’ll probably end up investing in some equipment to get the job done efficiently, and the equipment can have a long payback period when dried pasta is less than $2 a box.
We started off hand rolling the dough into thin sheets and cutting the noodles or squares with a pizza cutter, which is fine and dirt cheap, but in my case came with a backache penalty from hunching over the counter trying to cut things evenly. So we graduated to one of the hand-cranked, clamp-to-the-table pasta machines. This enabled nice, thin sheets of dough and evenly cut noodles, but the clamp kept slipping loose, and having to clamp it to the edge of a counter or table meant getting a lot of flour and crumbs on the floor.
After walking past the pricey pasta-making attachments, which plug into your stand mixer for weeks, we finally caught a sales price irresistible enough to jump. It comes with a dough roller and gizmos for making spaghetti and fettuccine, making it simple to just feed the dough in and watch the magic trail onto the counter.
We’ve made both those varieties of noodles along with hand cutting ravioli with the thin sheets of dough. The time spent noodle making matches the time you need to make most sauces, so there’s not a lot of additional time involved.
There are numerous opinions about what should go into a pasta dough with some saying you should use only the yolks of the eggs, some using no olive oil and some even adding a little milk. We’ve been using whole eggs, unbleached flour, some semolina flour, salt, oil and water enough to reach the proper dough stage.
To serve two, put 1 and a half cups of flour and about a half cup of semolina into a wide bowl (or on your large counter). Break two eggs into the center and begin mixing the flour into the eggs slowly. Add a pinch of salt and maybe a teaspoon or so of oil and keep going. Add water until it forms a kneadable dough and knead until smooth. Let it rest in plastic wrap awhile as you clean up the counter. We add semolina to give the pasta a little more sauce-grabbing texture.
Divide the dough into four equal pieces and add more flour to each as you knead it into a dough that can be easily handled without being sticky. Feed it through the rollers, beginning at the number-one setting, with two passes each time until you get the desired thickness. Cut the sheets to length and lay them aside with plenty of flour to prevent them sticking together. You’ll need several passes through the first setting, folding and flouring between, until the dough sheet is smooth and tight.
After cutting them as desired, the noodles take no time at all to cook in salted boiling water: a minute or so and they’ll be floating and tender.
While it’s more work, the time spent is perfect for sharing stories about your day with your special person.