We’ve been making fresh pasta with some regularity for the last year or so, spurred on at first by Carlalberto Relli of le piantagioni del caffe asking us to make a savory coffee dinner last winter (we’ll share our savory coffee discoveries at some point, but not just now) and continued because fresh pasta is both better and cheaper than dried pasta. Yes, here in Italy, where good cheap pasta can be had for €0.78 a kilo. We can get type 00 flour for about €0.29 a kilo, so the math works out well. Plus, Lauren finds it intriguing (not that I don't as well, it's just that the actual making of the pasta itself seems to fall on the baking side of our cooking/baking division of labor). Since the pasta dough and all will end up being pretty integral to a lot of things I thought I'd start out by describing how we (and I mostly mean Lauren) go about making it.
We almost never make egg pasta, partially because we developed our expertise while experimenting with coffee pastas (where you need the coffee to form a large part of the liquid and thus don't use egg) but mostly because eggs aren't really necessary and add extra expense and ingredients to the pasta. For the first year or so we rolled out the dough with an empty wine bottle, cut the sfoglia (the uncut flat sheet of pasta dough) with a knife and then rolled them out again (if doing linguine or filled pasta's) or pinched and rolled the pieces into pici (pici is a hand formed pasta from around Sienna that looks a bit like spaghetti the size of a dinner straw). Dust the pasta lightly with flour and let it dry for a while, then cook. Over the summer we got ourselves a little hand cranked pasta machine (a Marcato Atlas 150 if it matters) which dramatically speeds up the process of rolling out the sfoglias and cutting fettuccine or spaghetti (which is what it came with -- you can get other cutting dies but we haven't yet). The hard bit is getting the cooking time just right -- start with 2 min. and experiment. We've found that extra (more than 5 min.) drying time makes it easier to get decent al dente results.
Recipe
For each cup or so of flour (feeds 2) add about tablespoon of olive oil and around a 1/4 cup of water. Kneed it together until the dough is smooth but not at all sticky. Cover and let it rest for 10 min. or so, then roll it out and cut. Dust it with flour and let it dry for between 15 min. and 2 hours. Bring a large pot of water to boil, add salt (Italians, or at least Tuscans, add salt in extremely generous proportions to everything except bread and that certainly includes pasta water) and cook pasta for 2 min. or until it tastes done.
We almost never make egg pasta, partially because we developed our expertise while experimenting with coffee pastas (where you need the coffee to form a large part of the liquid and thus don't use egg) but mostly because eggs aren't really necessary and add extra expense and ingredients to the pasta. For the first year or so we rolled out the dough with an empty wine bottle, cut the sfoglia (the uncut flat sheet of pasta dough) with a knife and then rolled them out again (if doing linguine or filled pasta's) or pinched and rolled the pieces into pici (pici is a hand formed pasta from around Sienna that looks a bit like spaghetti the size of a dinner straw). Dust the pasta lightly with flour and let it dry for a while, then cook. Over the summer we got ourselves a little hand cranked pasta machine (a Marcato Atlas 150 if it matters) which dramatically speeds up the process of rolling out the sfoglias and cutting fettuccine or spaghetti (which is what it came with -- you can get other cutting dies but we haven't yet). The hard bit is getting the cooking time just right -- start with 2 min. and experiment. We've found that extra (more than 5 min.) drying time makes it easier to get decent al dente results.
Recipe
For each cup or so of flour (feeds 2) add about tablespoon of olive oil and around a 1/4 cup of water. Kneed it together until the dough is smooth but not at all sticky. Cover and let it rest for 10 min. or so, then roll it out and cut. Dust it with flour and let it dry for between 15 min. and 2 hours. Bring a large pot of water to boil, add salt (Italians, or at least Tuscans, add salt in extremely generous proportions to everything except bread and that certainly includes pasta water) and cook pasta for 2 min. or until it tastes done.
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