handmade pasta - at home

i've been wanting to make pasta at home for a while now, and i just got an Imperia pasta machine off of ebay. i thought it would be fun to document my efforts, and hopefully others will chime in with their experience, advice, and comments.

i thought i would start with a basic egg pasta and found rave reviews of the recipe in the french laundry cookbook. the recipe uses:

6 egg yolks
1 whole egg
1 1/2 tsp olive oil
1 tbs milk
8 oz ap flour

the steps are straightforward and use the well method of incorporating the liquid into the dry ingredients.

pour the liquid ingredients into the well and break up the eggs. stir the eggs with your fingers, slowly incorporating the flour as your fingers move around the well. it took longer than i thought it would, but keller emphasizes incorporating the flour gradually so as to avoid lumps.


once i incorporated most of the flour, the dough was on the shaggy side, moist but not sticky. pretty easy to work with.


i kneaded for about 15 minutes or so and it was pretty smooth, but keller says to knead for another 10 mins or so even after you think it's ready. here's the finished dough, ready for resting.



the dough is now resting in the fridge. i'm planning to roll it out tomorrow. more to come.

shyne

Nice looking texture on the dough ball. Keep us posted.

Geo

The French Laundry pasta dough is pretty darn awesome stuff. Yes, it's a little wetter than some other pasta recipes, but the huge amount of yolk with a little kneading turns it into a wonderfully silky paste.

I've made two of the agnolotti recipes from the book, both came out wonderful.

That's gangsta

A public service announcement:

if you're happy with a more rustic pasta, you don't need a pasta roller to make pasta at home. All you need is a rolling pin and a thin-bladed knife. I've been making quite a bit of pasta at home and I still haven't sprung for the kitchen aid pasta roller attachment that I covet.

I love the fact that some semolina flour, fresh eggs, salt, two basic tools, and a small amount of time produce fantastic pasta.

Best,
Michael

Thanks for the suggestions here - both the recipe and the idea of making it without a pasta maker. I got one of those roller-type machines as a wedding gift (I don't recall the brand, it was from Williams Sonoma) and after returning 3 (three!!) after each and every one left fine shreds of metal in the finished product, I gave up.

on to the making of the pasta!

step 1 - let the dough come to room temp.
step 2 - cut the dough into 4 pieces.
step 3 - take one piece and flatten it out. i tried to get into a roughly rectangular piece.
step 4 - roll it thru the machine on the widest setting, #1. when it comes out, fold it in thirds and run it thru again. repeat about 10 times.


step 5 - roll it thru the #2 setting twice.
step 6 - repeat step 5 for settings #3-5.
by the time i was done, I had a very long, thin piece of dough.


step 9 - run the dough thru the cutter of choice


and there it is - finished nests of fresh fettucine ready to be cooked!


and for our inaugural efforts at making pasta at home? i made some duck confit back in april with a couple of ducks from h-mart. it's hard to resist tearing right into it when it's first made, but i had purposely included the wing pieces in the cooking. we ate those right away, but managed to restrain ourselves enough to tuck away the legs and breasts into the back of the fridge and, for the most part, forgot they were even there. but when i got the pasta machine in the mail earlier this week, i knew i wanted to make a pasta + duck confit dish. i had some wild thoughts of trying to do a ravioli, but i figured i should try to make a straight pasta on my first attempt. and so - fettucine with duck confit, mushrooms, and fennel in a light cream sauce.

the meez: duck fat, blue marble cream, chopped river valley mushrooms, sliced CSA fennel and fennel fronds, shredded homemade duck confit, shallots, CSA garlic, and CSA parsley hidden behind the confit.


sautéed the mushrooms in duck fat first. then the fennel, onion, and garlic.


added the duck confit and then the mushrooms.


boiled the pasta in well salted water. it took barely 2 mins.


added about 3/4 cup huber hugo (a 2007 austrian gruner veltliner). reduced and added 1/4 cup of cream.


added pasta to the sauce. added about 1/2 cup of the pasta water here too.


finished with finely chopped parsley and fennel fronds and some microplaned locatelli romano cheese (from bari).


wow. this was seriously good. i certainly agree that pasta can be made at home without a machine, but boy, was it way, way easier with the machine. this is easily something we will do regularly (at least i hope it is!). the most significant outlay of time was in the kneading of the dough, but it was totally worth it. the pasta was tender and delicious. and i loved being able to incorporate so many of our CSA items.

i would love to see anyone else's ideas and efforts at homemade pasta as well. my intent is to post more of what i do with this new machine here!! hope you enjoyed!

shyne

Well done. What a glorious looking meal. I don't even eat animals and felt I could darn near smell how divine the meal tasted.

Did you read Michael Pollan's article in the NY TImes this week about cooking?

shyne wrote:i thought i would start with a basic egg pasta and found rave reviews of the recipe in the french laundry cookbook. the recipe uses:

I've been making a lot of pasta lately (see video) using a Marcella Hazan recipe, but the FL yolk-heavy recipe looked intriguing, so I tried it yesterday and really enjoyed it. Thanks for posting it - this is better than the Hazan one!

Great thread and documentation!!! That looks incredible!

Lovely shyne, just lovely! Nice to just happen to have some duck confit hanging around, too, eh?!

But I'm not sure I have the guts to try the FL method/technique/recipe. After a bit of casting about on the web, I found this, which is about as thorough as set of instructions as one could desire. It sounds hard doing it this way, it really does. But maybe I'll just have to give it a try—your noodles look so glorious...

Tnx for the enticing show and tell!

Geo

thanks to all for the lovely comments and compliments! it was a pleasure to share my pasta making experience with you.

Geo wrote:But I'm not sure I have the guts to try the FL method/technique/recipe. After a bit of casting about on the web, I found this, which is about as thorough as set of instructions as one could desire. It sounds hard doing it this way, it really does. But maybe I'll just have to give it a try—your noodles look so glorious...

i really would encourage you to try this one. before the last couple of days, i had no experience making pasta or even dealing with dough successfully, and this turned out great. i found this link, to keller's recipe that provides more detail about the process.

Bill/SFNM wrote:I've been making a lot of pasta lately (see video) using a Marcella Hazan recipe, but the FL yolk-heavy recipe looked intriguing, so I tried it yesterday and really enjoyed it.

i enjoyed the video - does chitarra refer to the way you cut the pasta? glad to hear another successful data point on this recipe.

pairs4life wrote:Did you read Michael Pollan's article in the NY TImes this week about cooking?

this one, right? it's in my stack of "to read" stuff. the first page was definitely interesting. although it wasn't julia child, the pbs cooking shows that were on when i was a kid were instrumental in developing my interest in and love of cooking at home - including the frugal gourmet, yan can cook, the great chefs series. and while there were a number of shows i enjoyed in the early days of the food network (david rosengarten's taste, for example), the same simply cannot be said for what's on there today.

shyne wrote:does chitarra refer to the way you cut the pasta?

The cutter you see in the video is composed of many strings which is evocative of a "guitar" or chitarra in Italian.

I have followed the practice of encouraging my sons to learn to cook by suggesting they make their favorite foods, and have generally refrained from comment when the foods they chose seem overly ambitious. Generally this has produced good results -- who knew it was so easy to make samosas? But we had a near meltdown last summer with my older son deciding to make ravioli. With no special equipment and no idea what he/we were getting into. We came very very close to ordering out pizza: trying to get lumpy pasta dough to surround very runny artichoke-leek filling, we were doubled over in laughter, and would have tossed the whole mess, had not Younger Brother come by and encouraged us to at least throw the mess into the hot water and see what happened. Low and behold, more than half held together and were edible -- dough like shoe leather, but excellent filling. (I would include photos of the disaster if I had them - but I was up to my elbows in filling and in no state to hold a camera.)

Flash forward, I bought Older Son a ravioli maker for the holidays. Not surprisingly, the end result was dramatically better!



The dough had a great texture; we used a different recipe, but I'm not really sure if that is what made the difference. The dough was good, but a bit thick. Reading through the thread above, I realized that the main thing we could have done to improve it would have been to find the pasta machine, which is in a box in the garage since we moved seven years ago... I'll put this on the list to do before my son comes home this summer.



We were both nervous about pressing the indentations into the dough, but it was a very elastic dough, and there was nothing to be nervous about.



The filling was fresh basil, goat cheese and Parmesan, and was absolutely delicious.



The ravioli shaper worked very well. We were impressed with how official the results looked.



Delicious!

The recipe said it made 24 ravioli; we had plenty of filling left over, though I don't think we could have filled each ravioli fuller. If we had used the pasta roller, we would have had enough pasta for at least 36, I think. In any case, the two brothers took care of the problem by using the leftover filling to make more ravioli at 2AM.

[edited once because I hit 'submit' when I meant to hit 'preview' and wasn't finished writing the post]

I'm so glad this thread got bumped - Judy, somebody's gotta teach these boys how to cook, right? I'm very excited to have just recieved a copy of Jaques Pepin's "Complete Techniques" and, lo and behold, there's a recipe for spinach tagliatelle that doesn't reqire a pasta machine. Although we have a plan in the works for another dish, Sparky's interest was piqued.

Mhays, we didn't use a pasta machine, and it worked out okay, but the dough seemed a little tough, or maybe too thick. Perhaps it was the recipe, perhaps it was our handling of the dough ('our' being used loosely, because I think all I did was give one last roll of the pin and declare it the right size), it might have been slightly undercooked. But my best guess for a remedy is that it could be rolled thinner with a pasta machine. We have one of those hand-operated machines, but haven't used it in years and probably can't find it until spring, as I am fairly sure it is in the unheated garage, buried in a pile of boxes. My son is away at college and won't be home until late May, so I have a little time!

Does anybody have a good recipe for whole-wheat ravioli?

I made whole wheat linguine this weekend, substituting whole wheat pastry flour for all of the AP flour. It was a little denser, but still tasty. I could have rolled it a bit thinner.

I've found that I can switch out at least half of the flour for WW pastry in most recipes with good results. The one exception is bread where I use no more than 50% WW pastry flour, and bread flour for the balance.