Pasta Making

My mom got us a pasta maker to "share" for our birthdays. I took it for a test drive yesterday. I started out with big plans to make fettuccine and ravioli. I ended up making two recipes of fettuccine. One batch regular unbleached flour and egg pasta, one batch spinach.

Initially I tried to make some light wheat pasta. It consists of half wheat flour half unbleached white flour. That didn't go so well. I have been complaining about my current bag of unbleached flour for a while now. I now know pasta dough has a tougher consistency than other doughs, but there was no way the light wheat dough was going to stay together or roll out to go through the pasta maker. I'm pretty sure I can contribute most of my troubles to the bad bag of flour. This flour had been sabotaging my pie crusts for some time. I finally threw the crap away.

Anyway, I moved on to just regular pasta using some new flour Matthew bought from the bulk section at Sunflower Market. The dough still had a funky texture as I mixed it together. I double checked the recipe, yes, I was following it exactly! I did the initial mixing in my Kitchenaid mixer and then transfered the dough to a pastry sheet to knead it the rest of the way. The funny thing about pasta dough is that it is really very dry and you get a little suspicious about whether it will come together in one piece. Hang in there, it will! I think this makes the noodle actually stay as a noodle.

It's pretty fun to run the dough through the pasta machine. First you run it through the gadget that makes it into a big sheet. Fortunately my mom warned me that the pasta sheet may come out with some holes the first time. It does, but you just fold it in half and run it through again until it is all kneaded together.

We ate the first batch of pasta immediately after I made it. I felt like I was finally getting the hang of things and wanted to practice some more so I took a chance on the spinach pasta. We ate it for dinner with an alfredo sauce Matthew made from the yellow Gourmet cookbook.

Fresh pasta is delicious. It's worth the work and one of those things that will get better with practice.