making fresh pasta from scratch

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thetyreman

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anybody made pasta from scratch?

I want to give it a go,

what's the best way to do it?
 
Big bowl.
Flour
Salt (pinch)
egg (1 egg per 100g flour)
Mix
Water (small amount)
Mix
Knead to smoothish, cover and leave for an hour.
Fist size balls.
Roll
Use pasta machine to make sheets.
Use pasta machine to cut tag or spag.
Personally i prefer ravioli or dumplings.

Good luck. Its easy once you work out the amount of water you need to bind it.
 
Made some tonight.
300 grams 000 flour
3 eggs.
Put flour on work top and make a well for the eggs. Incorporate the flour into the eggs and continue until you have a dough. Kneed the dough until soft place in fridge for 20mins covered with cling-film.
Shape as required.
Beats dried pasta any day!!!
John
 
Use a duck egg, much better texture to the pasta (due to higher fat content I'm told)
DO NOT ADD SALT to the mix. Add it to the cooking water and it will be absorbed by the pasta to the correct flavouring, 1 level teaspoon per liter of water. This avoids you causing damage to the pasta machine by encouraging the formation of rust on it as the salt gets into bits you can never clean properly. I have had 2 pata machines in my life, the first lasted about 3 years and was wrecked by rust, the 2nd Ive had since 1993 still looks as good as new and was the best 150 bucks spent while on that Italian holiday. It lets me make 21 different types of pasta shape.
If you want to add a great twist to the pasta then very finely chop some fresh basil and oregano and add that to the mix and also squid ink is good too
 
I had a go at alphabeti spaghetti a few times and tbh it's a bit of an ar*eache between me and you Ben. The straight letters are ok. It's the m's, g's and o's that mess you up. The carving took ages.
Like. I love fresh pasta as much as the next man. But there's a limit.
Luckily.
I recently found there's some exclusive foodie types who are already producing it in micro batches for the modern gourmet! I know! Brilliant right?
Look for a forward thinking uber modern German young chef named summat like Hans. Can't remember precisely. All the rage in the best restaurants. He also does a rolled back ultra simple version of beans. Normal beans. But baked.
I know right!?!
Brilliant!
Visionary.

If he's got any sense Hans will move onto soup next.
 
To confirm what some have said above: 100g strong flour plus one egg per serving - never add salt. We make 3 kg at a time when we have a glut of eggs, and dry it on a clothes rack. It takes 36 hours, or thereabouts before it is ready to be put in a giant box, with a few cloves of garlic to keep the beasties out.

If you have a food processor, mix the dough up in that - it will look like breadcrumbs when it it's ready, but you can squeeze it into dough fairly readily. A pasta machine will help immensely. Work the dough until it feels "silky smooth", and only then roll it out to the required thickness. With a pasta machine, just keep feeding it through on setting number one, fold in half and feed it through again, and again, until you notice the change in feel. Then work up through the numbers - 6 or 7 is good for tagliatelle, and spaghetti. Lots of extra flour on the dough as you work it will stop it sticking to itself.

I recently learned that durum wheat is used to make both pasta and semolina - you may be able to use semolina flour to make pasta more like shop stuff, but I haven't tried it yet.
 
I bought the pasta extruder attachment for a kenwood mixer and make macceroni, fusilli, spaghetti quadri and bucatini.
Pasta flour to beaten egg at a ratio of 2:1, then you don't have to worry about the size of eggs, as in other posts never salt in the dough. I make it in batches and freeze it in two portion bags.
 
The pinch of salt isn't for flavour, it's a pinch in a massive amount flour. it's to help open up the proteins in the egg white (albuiom or something) and allow them to bond in a more uniform manner to give you a more pliable dough with less kneading it also "strengthens" the gluten in the flour making it more stretchy, this makes it harder to overwork the dough which would lead to tough pasta (like passing it through a sheet roller 10 times)

guess I'm wrong, don't really care, it's how I do it, it's how I was taught to do it, how I've done it for a long time and how I'm going to continue to do it. maybe I'll stop when my 20 year old pasta machine dies, till then, screw it. :)
 
I use 40% fine semolina ,it adds a nice texture I don't like it to silky just seems too manufactured.
 
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