Homemade Pasta

Maybe the cooking / baking slump is over? Today, I decided for Sunday dinner (by myself since the hubs is up camping with his high school friends) to make pasta from scratch. I had tried in the past to make pasta and always horribly failed or never got it thin enough. Then last year, one of my co-interns, Dr. Erin, kindly invited me over to her house and went through the ins and outs of how to make a great pasta. It took me a little time to get down all the steps again, but once I got my muscle memory going, the pasta turned out great. It's actually quite easy and doesn't take that long once you get the hang of it. The results are so worth it. Homemade pasta tastes so much better than the boxed stuff. Plus, you can throw in any herb or even finely chopped sundried tomatoes to make an exquisite dish. Here's the recipe and the steps: 

Homemade Pasta (basic)

Ingredients:

4 eggs 

4 cups of all-purpose flour 

4-6 Tablespoons of water. 

Directions:

1. Place all ingredients into a bowl or mixer affixed with a dough hook and mix until the ingredients just start to come together into little clumps. It should be VERY crumbly. 

2. Take a about a baseball sized amount of crumbly dough and pack it together into a little flat-topped mound:

3. Squish this mound through your dough machine at the widest setting (mine is 7). It should come out like a really coarse, fat piece of pasta dough:

3. Fold this piece of dough into halves or thirds to make another little packet of dough:

Run this through the pasta machine at the same wide setting. 

4. Now you should have a smoother, but still thick piece of pasta dough. If you don't, keep folding and running the packet through the dough machine at the widest setting until there are no "runs" or other major imperfections in the dough. (It doesn't have to be perfectly smooth, but shouldn't have any holes, etc.) It should look something like this: 

5. Now, once you have a piece of pasta like this, you WILL NOT fold it any more before putting it through the pasta maker. You'll just put one end in and glide it through. So, put the pasta through the maker, again (one more time) on the widest setting to smoothen it out. Then, adjust the setting to the next narrowest and run the pasta through end-to-end (no folding). Keep doing this with one or two passes per each narrowing of settings until you get down a thickeness that you like. (I don't like to use the smallest setting. I usually stop a little before that). It often helps to have two sets of hands helping as the pasta sheet gets longer:  One to crank the machine and one to feed the dough / catch the dough on the other end to ensure that it goes through smoothly. Eventually, you will end up with a REALLY long piece of thin perfect pasta dough! 

6. Now, you can use this piece of pasta to make raviloli or lasagna, or you can run it through the "chopper" part of the pasta maker and make it into strands of spaghetti or linguine. 

7. Once you have your pasta, cut it to the desired length and either boil it right away for 3-4 minutes or hang it on hangers to dry and then store in the fridge for another day. 

Enjoy!!