Laurabelle’s Blog

Several years ago Jeff's mother gave us a pasta maker. I think we used it once, though I don't actually remember doing so. (I do remember trying to roll pasta dough by hand, which didn't work terribly well.) The machine has sat in the closet for at least as long as we have been in California.

So why I suddenly decided to make fresh pasta on Sunday for my mother, who is visiting for the weekend, I don't know, but it was an awesome idea.

Making fresh pasta is a little weird. You start out by making a pile of flour on your work surface (or if you're a pansy, you can use a bowl). Make a well in the center of your flour and crack some eggs into it, then whisk the eggs and start mixing them with the flour. Knead the dough until it becomes smooth and elastic, then divide it in four and let it rest for a little while under plastic wrap or a bowl.

Now comes the rolling. A pasta machine makes this a lot easier; it has rollers that squeeze the dough thin and even. The rollers are adjustable, so you start out on the widest setting. Put the dough through, fold it, roll it through again, fold, and repeat about 6 times. Tick the rollers to the next setting and put the dough through a few times; repeat until the dough is smooth, satiny, and as thin as you want it.

Then you run your finished sheet through the machine's cutting mechanism to slice it into the right pasta shape. In my opinion this is the most annoying part of the pasta process, since the resulting noodles are soft, a little sticky, and much harder to control than the pasta sheets. When we hung the fettuccine up to dry, most of them stuck together, and we had to tease them apart carefully in order to avoid breaking them or stretching them too much.

Yesterday we ate our fresh fettuccine with a simple alfredo sauce that allowed the flavor of the pasta to shine through. (For those of you who think pasta is only given flavor by its sauce, take the time to make some fresh pasta; it will show you what you've been missing.) I wish I had photos of the finished fettuccine alfredo, but I was too hungry to pick up the camera.

Today we made another batch of pasta, for slightly delayed consumption. We will have chicken ragu later this week, so we rolled fettuccine into little bundles to dry. They will keep fine for at least a few days; we will let them dry completely and then store them in air-tight containers as the Joy of Cooking commands.

Yum!