Even more fun with the pasta machine

We did a couple of posts a while back about all the fun we were having with our pasta machine, making ravioli and Chinese dumplings. Last night the machine was dragged out again, this time to make tagliatelle.

Fun with a pasta machine 

More fun with a pasta machine

So if you still haven’t been brave enough to give home-made pasta a go, here’s another post to inspire (or brow-beat) you.

You will need:

• 100g pasta flour (also called 00)
• 1 large egg
• a splash of olive oil
• pinch of salt

Making the dough

You can either try out the traditional Italian Nonna way, put your flour on a board and make a well in the middle for your egg, or put it in a bowl (less messy). But the idea is to beat the egg and incorporate the egg, oil and seasoning into the flour to make a dough.

It feels more like a pastry dough than a bread dough, much tougher and less springy but with 5 or 6 minutes of needing it will come together into a silky ball of dough.

Once you have this, your pasta dough is made, just wrap it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge for half an hour to chill.

That’s it – super easy huh?

Shaping your dough into the pasta we all know

Shaping the dough is much easier if you have a pasta roller, but you can do this with a regular rolling pin, it just takes longer. Ok so in the interest of total honesty, a lot longer, but it is do-able and Italian Nonna’s were doing it this way for centuries.  We are just weak and feeble! 🙂

If you are using a pasta roller simply flatten the dough until it is just thin enough for it to catch on the rollers and be pushed through. The rollers work like an old laundry ringer, two rollers that force the dough through between them and squish the dough flat on the way, basically turning it from a ball of dough into what you’d recognise as lasagne sheets, very, very, long lasagne sheets. The machine has various thickness settings so you can use it to make different types of pasta. Roll it to the thinnest setting for lasagne sheets or ravioli, a little thicker for spaghetti or tagliatelle.

In the photo, Kate has rolled it to 8 on our machine and then put it through the cutter setting to make tagliatelle.

The trick to this is to make sure the dough is not sticky, give it a dusting with flour to make sure it’s not too sticky. The same again with the cut tagliatelle strips, dust them with flour to make sure they don’t stick together but instead stay as the separate strips.

Fresh pasta cook soo much quicker than dried stuff, in fact it cooks in about 4 minutes! Super fast.