Pasta! Easy to make, versatile and tastes great! So why not make it yourself?
If you have your own chooks and eggs you already have half your ingredients and if you can grow your own wheat then you can have completely home produced pasta. I tried home grown wheat years ago but didn’t get much of a harvest so I use unbleached organic flour sourced from Demeter Farm mills, but we do use our own chook eggs so we are getting there.
OK, I do cheat, I use a pasta machine. Strictly speaking it is not necessary, you can roll pasta dough out with a rolling pin and then roll it into a.......well..........roll, of pasta then cut off lengths and unroll them, cook them and eat them. But I find that the pasta machine makes it easier and more fun, so that I am more likely to do it.
Making the Dough
1. Measure out 500gms of flour, we use a mix of organic 50% wholemeal, 50% unbleached white flour, into a bowl, make a well in the centre and then crack in 6 eggs (if you are going to all the trouble of making pasta and don’t have any chooks yourself, at least use free range eggs).
2. Mix the eggs into the flour with your fingers. The wholemeal can make for a stiff dough so you may wish to add in a bit of water or olive oil if you are having difficulty working it.
3. Turn the flour/egg mess (oops that should read mix) out onto a floured surface; marble slab, wooden table or plastic kneading sheet and knead the mix until the texture and that lovely golden egg pasta colour are uniform throughout the ball of dough.
4. Wrap the ball of dough in a tea towel and let it rest for half an hour. If you want to take a break at this stage don’t leave it too long. I once made up the dough, made some pasta then covered the rest in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge meaning to come back to it later. Within a day or two it had turned a disgusting grey/brown colour, it may have still been OK to use but no-one here was interested in yecch coloured pasta!
5. The cut the dough into roughly 1cm thick slices and run it through the pasta machine with the rollers on their widest settings, lightly flour it, double it over and run it through again, repeating until the dough is smooth.
6. Reduce the thickness of the dough by passing it through the machine, reducing the distance between the rollers each time, until you have the dough as thick as you want it.
Making the Pasta
Now you have the dough right where you want it you can make into homemade pasta. If you want lasagne, all you have to do is cut the sheets to size so that they will fit in your lasagne dish, the pasta will expand when cooked so cut it a bit small. Because the lasagne noodles are uncooked you will need to boil them for 10 to 12 minutes before assembling your lasagne.
If you want to make spaghetti or fettuccine, you machine should have come with rotary cutters to allow you to make either if these favourites. The big hint is to flour the dough sheets well before cutting otherwise the fresh, sticky pasta will stick to the machine, the cutters and itself driving you berserk and ensuring that this is you one and only experience with homemade pasta. Flouring the dough sheet will also make it easier to separate the strings of pasta. Either cook them immediately or set them out to dry. They can be hung over a broom handle or equivalent supported on a couple of chairs or even a clothes airer. You can buy specific pasta drying gadgets, but why bother?
Filled pastas like ravioli or cannelloni take a bit more effort and there are other attachments for your pasta machine to make it “easier”. Personally, having tried the ravioli maker, sorting out two sheets of pasta going into the machine and keeping it topped up with filling and then getting the ravioli out the bottom and stopping them sticking together. I should have had the doctor up my medication first because it really did push the envelope on frustration.
The ultimate came when I finally made a sheet of good looking ravioli and put it down on the bench seat near the table I was working on to dry off a bit, when my eldest came in to see how I was going and promptly sat on it. It is best to draw a curtain over the resulting hullabaloo. There must be a simpler way!
And there is! For a few dollars you can buy a wheel that is sort of like a pizza cutter but it cuts a zigzag line. To make ravioli easily place one sheet of pasta on a hard, clean surface, place on small lumps of filling on a grid pattern and then lay your second sheet over the top. Use the zigzag roller to cut between the lumps of filling and it seals as well as cutting. Stress free ravioli!
The zigzag wheel can also be used to cut out different shapes of pasta (as can a pizza cutter) to give you a bit of variety, but any way you cook it, homemade pasta is a great way of using up those excess home grown eggs and making a great feed at the same time.
Alternativley, have a look here.....
