How to make good home-made pasta

pasta dough waiting to be cut into lasagne noodles

Trick #1: Forget the whole “break eggs into the well of flour” doctrine

Have you gotten discouraged by attempting to follow pasta recipes which begin with instructions to make a well of flour on your (preferably marble) countertop, and then break eggs into the center of this well? And you then ended up with both hands covered in a god-awful sticky mess? Well, of course! You really know better than to break eggs straight onto your countertop and expect to get good results. At least, as a beginner.

The reason they tell you to start like that is because you need to let your eggs dictate the amount of flour they need. Eggs vary in size, and flour varies in absorbency, and so you can’t measure out how much flour to use. You have to just use the amount that your eggs require. However, there’s no reason to start everything off on the counter, unless you just really like to be covered with sticky goo. Break eggs into a mixing bowl (3 eggs will give you enough pasta for two main-dish servings of noodles.) Add 1 Tablespoon of olive oil to the eggs, and 1 teaspoon of salt. Now get out your flour. Ideally, I found that a combination of semolina flour and white pastry flour works best, but you can use plain white flour and get pretty decent results. Add enough flour to your egg-oil-salt mixture to make it the consistency of thick cake frosting. NOW, pour a little pile of flour on your countertop and scrape the mixture from the bowl out onto it. You can begin to knead flour into this mixture and it’s thick enough not to run all over everything or make slimy strings of goo everywhere.

Trick #2:  Knead the dough a lot when you’re first mixing it.

Handle it, work as much flour into it as it will reasonably hold, try to get it as un-sticky as possible.  Knead it like bread dough til it looks smooth and well-behaved and cohesive. 

Trick #3:  Ziploc bags work well for resting the dough. 

Resting the dough does really help.  They say it has to do with developing the gluten, but I also feel that it gives the flour time to absorb the egg and oil.  I tried not resting it, and it was stickier and less stretchy.  Let it rest for at least an hour, and preferably several hours.   I don’t refrigerate it during the resting unless it’s a hot summer day;  the eggs in the dough are not going to poison you if they sit at room temperature for a while.  [I know this is contrary to conventional safety advice, but I have lived without refrigeration for enough years to have discovered that the panic over keeping food cold is largely over-hyped.]  After all, you’ll be boiling the pasta before you eat it.  Pop the dough ball into a ziploc bag,  seal it up, and set it down for a nap.

Trick #4: Start rolling with a ball the size of a large lemon.

This assumes you’re using a hand-cranked pasta rolling machine.  You can do it by hand with a rolling pin if you’re just curious and want to play around one time, but if you’re going to be seriously producing enough to feed people on a repeated basis, you’ll need a pasta machine.  They’re great. 

Take a lemon-sized ball and squish it on the counter til it’s a nice oval about 5 inches by 8 inches.  Set your machine at thickness #1 and feed the oval through it.  All your previous kneading will pay off, because once you get the hang of this, you will not have to feed the dough more than once through any thickness setting.

After feeding it through at setting #1, you’ll have a longer, narrower oval.  Slice this in half the short way.  Now, feed the flat cut end of one of your halves into the machine at setting #2. 

Trick #5:  Dust your dough with flour before feeding it through the machine each time.

Trick #6:  Stop after setting #4 if you’re planning to use the noodle slicing attachment.

Thinner dough than this will not slice easily.  It’ll stick together, fall apart, and be generally annoying.  Noodles at a #4 thickness are just perfect.   You can go to #5 if you’re going to hand-slice lasagne.  Don’t even think about the #6 setting.  It’ll just make you crazy;  it makes the dough about one micron thick and huge enough to cover a tabletop (until you touch it, that is, at which point it will disintegrate.).

Trick #7:   Dredge the sliced noodles in tons more fresh flour before hanging or cooking. 

Trick #8:  If you’re cooking them right away, you don’t have to hang them.  Just mound them on a plate and then put them into the water when it’s boiling. Hanging dries the noodles out a bit so that they don’t collapse back into a wad of dough if you need to store them. 

Trick #9:  A wooden laundry rack works well for hanging.  Lacking that, I have strung yarn across my kitchen like a temporary clothesline.  

Trick #10:  If you really get into making noodles, an extra coffee grinder is great to mash up garlic cloves to put in them. You can add a spoonful or two of dry flour to the coffee grinder so the bits of garlic don’t stick to it.   But maybe cuisinarts do the same thing.  I just never had one.

Happy noodling!