Once You Make Fresh Pasts At Home You Will Walk By The Pasta Aisle At Your Grocery Store

Pasta holds a special place in our memories of childhood. Even if you didn’t grow up Italian, chances are you remember eating long strands of spaghetti and slurping up the sauce as you went. Pasta is made of simple ingredients: flour, eggs, olive oil and water. Don’t let the simplicity of the ingredients fool you into thinking that commercially made pasta is no different from homemade. Homemade pasta is true comfort food and easy to make. In our house, the making of pasta becomes a collaboration. There is something for everyone to do, no matter how young or how old. And the fruits of our labors end up in a wonderful family dinner that we all enjoy together.

A pasta machine is one of the tools that makes the job of turning dough into noodles easier. You can do it the old fashioned way and roll your dough into thin sheets using a wooden rolling pin, but I find that a uniform thickness is best achieved using a machine. There are electric machines and there are manual machines that you crank by hand. Weston, Lello and Imperia pasta machines are well known brands of electric pasta makers. The Kitchenaid pasta attachment is an wonderful addition to the Kitchenaid mixer for making pasta. Atlas, Imperia and CucinaPro are all good manufacturers of manual pasta makers. I personally have used the Atlas pasta machine for many years with absolutely delicious results.

You can choose to mix your dough by hand or by using an electric mixer of some type. Either method produces a soft, silky dough. If you are making dough by hand, place your flour in a bowl large enough to give you room to mix all ingredients together and make a well in the center of the flour. In another bowl, crack your eggs and beat them slightly, adding the oil and water, and mix well. Pour the liquid mixture into the well in the flour and mix with a fork until the flour is moistened and begins to clump together. Now the fun begins as you start playing with the dough.

Dust your hands with flour and begin to gather the clumps and begin kneading the dough right in the bowl. Grab the mass over onto itself, pushing and turning and folding the dough until it no longer sticks to the side of the bowl. Once you have one cohesive clump of dough, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, a large wooden cutting board works great, and continue to knead for 2 to 3 minutes.

The purpose of kneading the dough is to make sure that all the ingredients are fully incorporated together and to get the gluten in the flour to begin its work. If your dough is not coming together, sprinkle it with a little water and continue kneading. If the dough is sticking to your hands or the board, add a little flour by dusting the surface of the dough and the board. The dough is ready to rest when it becomes smooth, soft and pliable. Let it sit on the board at room temperature covered with a clean kitchen towel for about 30 minutes before rolling the dough.

Your pasta machine will come with basic instructions on how to process the dough. The basic steps are to roll pieces of dough through the rollers at thinner and thinner settings until you get nice, elongated, resilient pieces of dough. From there you cut the dough into whatever shapes you want. Dough may be cut and formed by hand, like simple papardelle, which are strips about 1 1/2 inches wide. All the pasta maker machines come with some attachments for cutting the dough. Tagliatelle and tagliolini are common pasta shapes that most of the manual machines produce. Electric pasta machines frequently have attachments that can extrude the dough into shapes like spaghetti and capellini.

Once shaped the pasta is lightly dusted with flour again, to prevent sticking to itself, and allowed to rest. You can cook the pasta immediately and toss it with your favorite sauce, or you can let it dry. A pasta drying rack keeps the noodles separated as they dry so the noodles won’t end up as a big clump of dough when you try to cook them. You can also freeze the pasta for future use.

Once you have made and eaten a batch or two of your own homemade pasta you will find it hard to go back to eating the commercially made and packaged type. Making pasta at home with friends and family is a joy and creates wonderful memories. It is said that food tastes better, and is better for you, when it is made with love. You can’t get much more comfort than that. Happy pasta making!

Making fresh pasta at home has been a Lauder family event for years. Family, friends and neighbors all take a hand in making the dough and sitting at the table to feast on the results. Watch a video on rolling dough through a pasta machine on Geri’s website, browse great cookbooks and select a pasta machine for your next family pasta party.