The first time the Mister and I spent time in Northwest Arkansas, he impressed the socks off of me when he said he wanted to make us homemade pasta. "Who is this cooking master and how did I get this lucky?" were my exact thoughts. So, together, we made pasta, ate it with the spicy goodness that is shrimp diablo sauce, and have been happy pasta makers ever since. (Check out this video of that first pasta making experience on the facebook page.)
If you have two cups of flour, salt, two eggs, 2 tablespoons of water, & one tablesppon of olive oil you can be a happy pasta maker too!! First, go check out Tom Collichio's recipe here. (If you feel moved to make the rest of the recipe go for it, but today I'm focusing on the pasta.) That's the exact receipt we followed… ish. The Mister is a firm believer that recipes are simply guidelines instead of hard and fast rules; there's hardly a recipe in our house that is followed to the letter. In this case we doubled everything so take that into consideration when you're looking at the images and start comparing it with yours at home.
Also, this post is simply a visual reference to look to as your making the Collicio recipe: He actually knows what he's doing so I'm not going to mess the wording up.
This is definitely a project that you should make if you like to get messy in the kitchen. Though these first three images look relatively tame, it soon got out of hand when, after grabbing flour from the same spot on the bottom/ outside of the flour well too many times there was a break in the "dam". Soon we had a bright yellow stream of egg coming out of our well and (after attempting to "catch" the mixture and continuing to incorporate it into the flour) the lumpiest pasta dough ever.
Yep, massive fail. But that's part of the fun of this process so roll with it and learn for next time.
In our case, we realized that instead of having a "volcano-shaped" well we should try to make a "backyard pool" well, i.e. it needed to be wide and shallow instead of tall and deep. This way, we could pull flour from the sides without "breaking the dam" and having a outflow catastrophe. (It could also be argued that my awesome skills helped this batch work since I was chosen to be the mixer this second time… but I won't go as far as to say I'm the best pasta mixer in the house… I'll let you make that call.)
The completed pasta dough, ready to be wrapped in saran wrap and rest for a while in the fridge.
My favorite part of this process is using the Kitchen Aid mixer + pasta attachment to transform the blob starts looking look a real product. (This is another deviation from the Collicio recipe- he was making ravioli and we wanted to make pappardelle. Again, do whatever makes you a happy pasta maker.) The dough starts as a ball and turns into long silky sheets of pasta.
The whole sheets could be used as a base for lasagna. Cut into squares this could be made into ravioli. Ran through the Kitchen Aid mixer again (with a different attachment) the sheets become skinny strand soy spaghetti. We used the pizza cutter to cut the wide strips that people recognize as pappardelle.
The BEST part of homemade pasta: The fact that it's not dried out for shipping and storage. Yes, this has a little bit to do with the taste and a whole lot to do with the fact that, once your water is boiling, it seriously cuts down on cooking time. Moral of the story: The yummy goodness is available for your consumption much quicker.
Have you ever tried to make homemade pasta?
Was a massive fail? Overwheming win? Not worth the effort?
Let us know!!!