I got a pasta maker for my birthday last month and being a long weekend and having all this extra time, my Fiance and I decided to try our hand at making fresh pasta today.  This was such a fun activity to do together and really was a team effort; we watched a few videos on different pasta recipes and  settled on a very straight forward one:

Fresh Pasta Dough Recipe:  (makes 2 servings)

1 cup all purpose flour

1 whole egg (make sure the eggs are room temperature and not straight out of the fridge)

1 egg yolk

To Prepare: 

Scoop a cup of all purpose four onto a large wooden board and make a well in the centre.

Start to whisk the egg with a fork adding more and more flour to thicken.  Now you can mix in the flour with your fingers.  Seth and I took turns making our own recipe, one with more egg, the other less to see which held up better.  This recipe worked and cooked best.

Using the heel of your hand, start pressing and kneading the dough, adding extra flour until it no longer sticks to your skin.  You should end up with a smooth ball of dough that when poked, rises up easily again.

Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and give it 20 – 30 minutes.

Now it was time to put the dough through the pasta press.  Unwrap the dough and press it down with your fingers to thin it out a bit so that it fits through the press.  Set the pasta press to 0 (zero) and run the dough through.  Sprinkle the dough with flour if it feels a little sticky so it doesn’t stick to the press.  Fold the first pressed piece in half and run it through the press again to give it some extra strength.

Move the press setting to 1 and run the dough through the press, over and over until you get to the thickness you prefer.  For us, it was good at 6.  Now the fun part came: cutting the dough into fettuccine.  You will have very long sheets of pasta at this point so we cut them in half before we fed them through the cutter.

We placed the cut Fettuccine on a cutting board until it was ready to be cooked and popped a bottle of Italian Prosecco.  Saluti!

The pasta only takes about 90 seconds to cook so I got to work right away on the fresh pasta sauce.  I posted the recipe to my sauce on my June/July What I’m Loving entry.  If you’d like it, go here and scroll down to Eating Like Italians:

https://thebellwitchmanor.com/2018/07/17/what-im-loving-june-july-edition/

To add to the freshness of my sauce, I used the tomatoes and basil grown on our balcony.

To cook the pasta. Boil a ltr of water in a large pot.  Do not add oil. Only a couple of pinches of salt when the water boils.  Add the pasta and time 90 seconds.  The pasta will float when it’s cooked.  Seth tried a noodle and it was perfect at this point.

Strain the pasta and add it to the sauce, stir and serve right away garnished with parmesan cheese.

When we were in Italy, we just loved the refreshing appetizer of prosciutto and cantaloupe so we started with that followed by our home made pasta.

This was such an amazing, satisfying meal. Even more so knowing that we prepared it together from scratch.  It was a fun and different activity to do together and for a moment, with the sunshine and stifling heat in the city today, I almost felt transported to Siena Tuscany again.

Thank you for joining us in the kitchen today.  I leave you with my apron I bought in Florence.  I’ve decided I will collect aprons from all the places I travel to.  Aprons and fridge magnets.

Love,

Jennifer.