Homemade Pasta

We make our own laundry detergent, bread, fabric softener, and now-- pasta!! We tried out the new pasta maker for the first time for lunch today. It's Brian's birthday and we wanted to have a nice lunch. It worked beautifully, and we had fresh pasta in a little over an hour. Why buy something when you can make it!? That is more and more becoming my life motto. :) This post is full of photos, courtesy of birthday boy, so let's begin!

The dough is made out of flour and eggs. That's it! I added a couple tablespoons of water to get the consistency right. You have to work at it for awhile (it's tough dough), but once you do you get beautiful results!

You get this smooth little ball of dough that's ready to rest for 20 minutes in saran wrap. It's not going to rise or anything--just rest. The resting and kneading makes the pasta lighter in the end. 

A pasta machine has 9 levels. You run the dough through level 1 five times, folding the dough in half between each time. Then you run it through each of the remaining 8 levels one time each. It stretches the dough nice and thin, and at the end you have a product that is probably eight times the length of what you started with! This is why it's nice to have a helper--especially when you're learning. 

We decided to make linguini first. The pasta maker comes with linguini and spaghetti (more like a very fine angel hair really) cutters. This is the fun part-watching your dough turn into beautiful ribbons of pasta. 

After you have all the pasta cut, you can do two things. You can hang it up to dry out. Or, you can do what we did which was toss it thoroughly in flour so it doesn't stick together in clumps while you wait to cook it. I actually have all the pasta drying like that right now in bowls. We don't have a fancy pasta drying rack and I didn't feel like cleaning clothes hangers. Maybe we'll rig up some kind of clothes line in the kitchen in the future. :)

We also made the angel hair spaghetti. It was so thin and delicate. It's funny how condensed it made those huge sheets of pasta dough

And finally--our cooked pasta! I had the timer set for 4 minutes, and took it out a little before then. It may have even been a tad overcooked. Homemade pasta cooks REALLY fast. 

We used jar sauce, don't judge. (Classico vodka sauce-it's awesome! I would have made my own, but didn't have heavy cream or vodka. Those are kind of important...) This was pretty delicious. 

So when do you want to come learn how to make pasta? :) Several people want to learn so I'm thinking of picking a day and having everyone bring 4 eggs and 3.5 cups of flour and spending an afternoon making pasta and ravioli. We could also make an easy marinara sauce from scratch. Let me know if you're interested. 


Next up will be ravioli. I'm very excited for this one! It doesn't take much more time. When the dough is resting you make an easy filling. All you need is a ravioli cookie cutter or a pastry cutter and you're in business. I'll post about the ravioli some time next week hopefully. Happy Friday!