Hold the Meat – I made my own pasta!

For better or for worse, pasta is a staple in many vegetarian diets (and that sentence is how I am able to justify this as a “Hold the Meat” post [brilliant!]). A lot of times, I’ll pretend to be healthier about it by buying whole wheat pasta and/or organic noodles. However, sometimes I”ll just throw the $1.00/box stuff in there too.

The other day though, I was reading All & Sundry, and she was talking about how she’s recently been making more food from scratch. This is something I’ve been trying to do as well, especially now that Cooper is a bit older and is eating human food (as opposed to, you know, dog food). So I clicked through to some of the recipes that she’s used, and holy crap! Why the hell didn’t anybody tell me that there are only three ingredients in pasta, and that they’re all things that I have in my house right now?

2 1/4 cups flour, 3 eggs, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. That’s all! It’s super-easy too. You just beat the eggs, and put them into a little flour nest in a large bowl, like so:

Then you mix it all together until it forms a ball of dough. Knead it about five minutes, and then put it in some greased plastic wrap (I just sprayed some cooking spray on it) and let it sit for at least 30 minutes, at which point you can get your sauce on the stove. After that, take about 1/4 of the dough and roll it out.

This part was actually pretty fun for me, because it was the first time I’d actually used a rolling pin (I know, I’m really pathetic).

Roll it out until it gets about as thin as you would want a noodle to be. Then, roll it up like you would a jelly roll and cut it into little wheels:

After that, just unfurl them, and put them aside. Do this for the three remaining quarters of your dough, then boil the pasta for about 5 minutes, until it’s firm but tender. The noodles start to float when they’re done; it doesn’t take long at all. After that, you’ve totally got pasta– without even having to have a pasta machine.

For a first try, I was really impressed with how it came out. Other than the 30 minutes the dough has to rest, it’s actually a pretty quick process. I made it kind of slow, just because I was nervous about it, but in general you can do this pretty quickly. It’s important to note that you don’t really have to roll the dough up– you can just roll it out and cut strips. I’ll probably do that next time, because the noodles ended up being a little thicker than I wanted them to be.

Going forward, I’d like to experiment with filled pasta, as well as different kinds of flour– maybe I’ll even use Debbie‘s favorite, spelt flour. But for the first time I wanted to keep it as straightforward as possible, and I’m quite pleased with the results.

Clacked by Kona Gallagher
on Jan 22, 2010 @ 10:00 EST5EDT