How to Make Fresh Pasta
I have written a few times about sauces that go with pasta, but I have yet to tell you how easy it is to make a nice, fresh, tasty pasta at home. Sure, store-bought pasta is fine; I use it often myself, especially when I am in a hurry. But for the ultimate pasta experience, absolutely nothing beats the home-made stuff, especially if you cook it before it has a chance to dry.
The ingredients for pasta are as simple as it gets: flour, eggs, a bit of olive oil, and maybe some water. You can add other ingredients to color or flavor it, but those are strictly optional. The equipment you need is also very simple: a large bowl, a flat surface and something to roll out the pasta. A pasta machine is very convenient to have; I have a manual one that cost me about 35 dollars; there are electric ones as well that will extrude the pasta into various shapes, but mine simply flattens it and cuts it into two different shapes (not including the “uncut” shape). But before I ever bought a pasta machine, I made my first few patches of pasta with nothing more than a bowl and an empty wine bottle for rolling. All right, I’ll be honest: it started out as a full bottle, but when I get cooking Italian I have a tendency to get a little celebratory, so full bottles don’t stay that way!
As I mentioned above, the ingredients are nothing more than flour, eggs and oil, with perhaps a bit of water if the pasta gets too dry. The exact amounts will vary according to what texture you like, as well as what the environmental conditions are. Dry air means the flour will absorb more moisture, so you might need some extra water. If you like softer pasta that is easier to handle, a little more oil will do the trick. Want something a little harder, like a good solid pasta for grating into Cous Cous? You can make that with just flour and water.
What I start with is 10 ounces (by weight) of flour, 2 eggs (lightly beaten) and 2 tablespoons of olive oil. This makes a nice, tender but firm pasta, enough to feed around six people. I have seen a lot of pasta recipes that tell you to start by piling your flour into a large bowl and making a “well” in the middle into which you add the beaten eggs and oil. Then you use your fingers to mix the flour into the eggs a bit at a time until the flour is all incorporated into the liquid. This will work, unless you are impatient like I am. What I end up doing usualy is making a large clump of wet flour, then I have trouble getting the rest of the flour mixed in. What I do now is start with just the liquid and adding the flour in a bit at a time until most of it is mixed in, then I use the rest of the flour on my flat surface as I knead the pasta. If the pasta dough is sticky, it will pick up extra flour; if not, it will not pick up much at all.
With practice you will know whether you need more moisture or more flour, but generally you want to strike a balance between softness and stickiness. If the pasta is hard and crumbly, add some water; if it is sticky, add a bit of flour.
When you have the right mixture, you “need to knead”. Kneading is what helps the gluten in the flour develop to the point where it will form a solid mass. Flour with fully-activated gluten will stick to itself, whereas flour in which the gluten is inactive will simply fall apart, and that does not work with pasta. Your pasta dough must be kneaded vigorously for about 10 minutes, and preferable for 15. The trick to kneading, if you have never done it, is to not rely on your fingers to do the hard work. Instead, use the heel of your hand and the weight of your body to push into the dough, then fold it over with your fingers, turn the dough and push again. This constant pushing and folding causes the strands of gluten to rub against each other, some of them joining and forming longer strands that will more easily connect to other strands. This is how miniscule individual particles of flour become one large mass of pasta.
Once the kneading is done, form the pasta into a ball and let it rest covered by a towel for about 20 minutes. This will let the gluten relax. This means the strands of gluten that have been pushed and pulled against each other and have been stretched to tightness will now have a chance to loosen up a bit, letting the pasta become softer and easier to work with. The strands will still stick to each other, they just won’t be so tight.
When the pasta has rested enough, cut the ball of dough into about 4 equal pieces. If you are using a rolling pin, simply flour your surface, flatten the ball of dough with your hand, and then go to work on it with your rolling pin. (Or empty wine bottle, for that matter!) Once you have achieved the thickness you want, flour the surface of the pasta, fold it a few times along its length, and then slice pieces off with a sharp knife to make your strands of pasta.
If you have a pasta machine, you have a chance to create something a bit more refined-looking. Most pasta machines will come with instructions, but since most machines are built on a similar premise I can give you a general idea of how it works. My machine is hand-cranked, and has two ends to work on. The one end is a variable-thickness press that simply flattens the pasta into strips about 6 inches wide or so. The other end has two rolls that will cut into different width strips, equivalent to fettuccine and spaghetti respectively. I start by rolling the pasta through the flattening rollers at the widest setting (1). Each time I roll it through I fold it and run it through again. Each time I do this I am getting a smoother and smoother finish, and straighter edges.
Once I start to see a nice satiny surface on the rolled pasta, I reduce the thickness setting to 2. This is a much thinner setting, and will flatten the pasta by about half. I no longer fold the pasta before running it through. Since the thickness will be reduced and the width does not change, it is predictable that the pasta will now be longer by a similar factor. A single run through the machine at this setting is sufficient. I run the pasta through on a thinner setting each time until I get down to the desired thickness (6 for lasagna, 7 for fettuccini and spaghetti). By the time I get to the last setting the pasta ribbon is now too long, so I cut it in half. Each of these halves is then run through the appropriate cutting roller, unless I am using the pasta for lasgana, ravioli or some other larger pasta cut. This is the finished product: from first roll to last, no more than 2 or 3 minutes to finish one of the quarters.
When I have a batch of cut pasta, I hang it to dry. The simplest thing to use is a broom handle propped across two chair backs. I always make sure to have enough room for all the strands to hang separate from each other, or at least as much as possible. If they dry together, they will clump, and it will be hard to separate them when they cook. I am not a big fan of clumpy pasta, so I go to great lengths to prevent it; if necessary I use more than one broom. I remember one time I made a large batch of pasta for a party. My apartment was full of hanging pasta! Fortunately, I am Canadian, and had a few hockey sticks to use!
By the way, if you are concerned about cleanliness and are worried about hanging pasta on something potentially dirty, just drape a tea towel or paper towel over your broom handle (or hockey stick!) and then hang your pasta on that.
Another way to prevent the pasta from drying together is to simply cook it right away! If you do this, you need to reduce the cooking time accordingly. Typically I cook dry pasta for 7 to 8 minutes, and fresh pasta for only 4 to 5. Fresh pasta is a real delicacy, something really worth the effort, so when I am making pasta by hand I try to time it to be ready for the next meal rather than the next day’s meal.
Yes, pasta-making is a bit of work, but with practice it gets a lot easier, and a modest investment in a pasta machine will make the process less painstaking and more professional-looking. But whether you opt for the machine or not, the taste difference will be noticeable, I assure you! On one of my future posts, I will tell you how to make ravioli with the stuffing of your choice: try that with store-bought pasta!
Yours in Good Taste,
Erik Christensen