Ingredients
Method
Make the pasta dough
- Wthe flour into a bowl. You can add a pinch of salt for flavour if you like.
- Make a well in the middle of the flour and crack your eggs into it.
- Use a fork to beat the eggs until they are smooth. Keep mixing, add a little flour at a time. Keep going until everything is mixed in. If you need to, use your hands to bring it together.
Knead your pasta dough
- Once your dough has come together you need to knead it to develop the gluten and make it nice and springy, like an Italian Nonna would make it. Knead it for 5-10 minutes until it is smooth.
Make the homemade pasta
- We have a pasta machine which makes life a lot easier when you're making pasta. If you don't you can still make pasta – just roll it out as thinly as possible with a rolling pin. Whether you are using a rolling pin or pasta machine, it's easiest if you start with a small piece of your dough, so take a portion and re-wrap the rest with your cling film so it doesn't dry up.
- If you are using a pasta machine, clamp it on to a clean work surface. Make sure it's a long one without any clutter as you'll need the space. Give your work surface a sprinkle of flour to stop the dough sticking later.
- Start with a small piece of dough and flatten it with your hands. Set your pasta machine to its widest setting and roll the pasta through it. If it sticks, sprinkle the dough with a little flour. Fold the dough in half and feed it through again. It should go through a bit easier the second time around. Repeat this step a few more times – once you've done it five or six times it will feel different. It'll be smooth and silky just the way pasta should be.
- Now you can keep rolling the pasta through the machine starting with the widest setting and going down through each setting until you get to the narrowest – or if you are making something like tagliatelle stop one or two up from the narrowest. Keep dusting it with flour if you need to to stop it sticking.
- We wanted to make tagliatelle so once we had our sheet of pasta used a separate tagliatelle setting on our pasta machine. We simply, fed the pasta sheet through and it cut it into strips for us.
- Once the pasta is ready hang it up to dry while you roll the rest. You can get special drying racks but we just put ours over our (clean) clothes drying rack!
Cook the fresh pasta
- To cook the pasta, add it to a pot of simmering water. It doesn't take long to cook in comparison with dried pasta from the supermarket. Just a few minutes will do.
- Serve with a tasty home-made pasta sauce, like this roasted red pepper sauce or our hidden veg sauce.