Fresh Homemade Pasta

You like pasta?

Well, you'll like fresh homemade pasta even more.

Is it hard?  NO!

Marcato Atlas pasta machine

You will need a pasta machine - if you're on a boat, a hand cranked one is ideal.

Then all you need is flour, water, eggs, and salt.

Makes approximately 1 lb of pasta:

• 365 grams flour
• 8 grams salt
• 2 eggs + water to make 181 grams of liquid

Why am I weighing things instead of following the more usual (American) standard of volume measure?  Well, because flour packs considerably, so the actual amount of flour you dump into your mixing bowl depends dramatically on how you packed it into the measuring cup.  And this is a recipe that is very sensitive to moisture content:  Too much and the pasta sticks to the rollers and cannot be successfully slit.  Too little and you simply cannot roll it.  So, get a scale and weigh the ingredients.

Mix with a fork, then by hand, and finally kneading on the counter until all the flour is incorporated.

Roll out into a log of roughly uniform diameter and cut into 6 equal pieces.

The initial passes thru the pasta machine are simply a continuation of the mixing, but in a shear regime that you cannot reach by hand.  Roll at position 1, fold, roll again.  Do this until all the unevenness in texture is gone.

Fold and roll again at position 3 (yeah, you can skip 2)

Roll again at position 4 (do not fold)

Roll again at position 5 (do not fold)

Hang each of the resulting pasta sheets on a rack to dry slightly.

Move the crank to the slitter portion of the pasta machine.  Slit each pasta sheet and hang the resulting noodles back on the rack, using a long spoon handle to capture and transfer the noodles.

Take the time to separate the noodles on the rack so that they don't stick together.

You can cook the noodles immediately in boiling water, or let them dry over night, or split the batch and do both.  The dry noodles will keep more or less indefinitely, but take considerably longer to cook than the fresh ones.

Trust me, it is so easy and so tasty that you'll never go back to store-bought pasta!

Fresh Homemade Pasta