Making Pasta: Egg, Flour, and Sweat

I had mentioned to a friend and fellow amateur chef once that I had never made fresh pasta. This friend happens to be Italian and therefore a natural-born pasta maker. So when Ron and I decided to get together with Alan and his girlfriend Kristen for dinner one night, we realized it was the perfect opportunity for me to learn a new skill.

Master 10 New Recipes:

1. Pasta with Mushrooms and Thyme
2. Sriracha Peanut Butter Tofu
3. Fresh Pasta

I'll say this: it was hard work. Admittedly, we were cooking for six people, which is a lot. And I would probably improve my speed with more practice. But still, I'd say it took me about two hours total.

Was it worth it? Well, yes. Learning something new - especially in a subject you are passionate about, like me with cooking - is almost always worth the work. And yes, fresh pasta tastes better and in a way is a totally different experience than dried pasta. But like I told Ronnie, I probably won't be making it for him at home anytime soon.

Okay, onto the lesson.

First, clear off a large portion of your counter and get some eggs and some flour together. Honestly I don't think Alan measured anything but just kind of knew. Mario Batali suggests 3 1/2 cups flour and 4 eggs for 4 servings of pasta, so I'm sure it was somewhere around there.

Sift the flour onto a large cutting board or straight onto the counter into a mound, then dig out a little bowl to crack the eggs into (as pictured below). Next start whisking the flour into the eggs with a fork. Be careful not to break the rim of the flour bowl. After what seemed like about an hour of me doing this slowly Alan assisted me and finished whisking in about two seconds. One thing he did which I didn't think to do was actually move the flour to create a smaller bowl shape.

 Note the third ingredient in making pasta dough: wine.

Eventually it will come together into a knead-able dough. Knead it by gathering it together with your fingertips and then pressing it with the palms of your hands. At first the dough will likely be horribly sticky and half of it will be stuck to your fingers. You can resolve this by slowly kneading in more flour.

You should knead for a solid 5-10 minutes until the dough is elastic and "tacky" but no longer too sticky to handle. Then wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let it rest for 20 minutes at room temperature.

Now is a great time for a glass of wine and perhaps an appetizer.

Next, rolling out the dough. I assume every pasta maker and every noodle shape is different, so don't take this as an instruction manual. But what we did was cut about 1/4 or 1/5 of the dough off of the total, roll it out, and put it through the machine once on each thickness setting until we got to the thickness we wanted.

You can see it starts out fairly thick and short:

And ends up looking something like this:

Once it is at the desired thickness you can cut it into whatever noodle shape you choose. I believe we did a fettuccini noodle as that was one of the settings on their machine.

Cook time varies depending on the noodle, but it is much shorter than with dried pasta. I think for the fettuccini noodles we cooked them for about three minutes.

After all this work I had built up quite an appetite, and we all dug into the pasta before I had a chance to get a good shot. Here's what was left over:

Clearly it was delicious. This is something that every aspiring chef should know and I am glad to have this skill under my belt.

But I am also glad that someone invented dried pasta.