Today I'll show you how to create excellent hand made pasta. Nowadays everybody can make excellent hand made pasta in few minutes using moder tools. First of all I want to distinguish "egg pasta"
(pasta all'uovo) from normal pasta:
- "egg pasta" is a mix of flour and eggs, it's delicious but it contains many calories. You may conserve it in the fridge only for few days. It's the queen of pasta
- "normal pasta" is only flour, water and oil. You can buy it in a market, one of the most famous international brand is Barilla. It's more difficult to prepare, but you can conserve it for months since it must become dry.
Consider that to create pasta you need few minutes, but pasta must rest 30 minutes during preparation (and you can make other things in this period).
The ingredient for 4 people are:
The secret to reduce time is to use a mixer with the plastic blades for mixing like this:
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| A Kenwood mixer with plastic blades for mixing |
If your mixer doesn't have the plastic blades, you can use the metal blades.
If you don't have a mixer, I discourage you to mix by hands. It's difficult, long and extremely dirt.
Put all flour and eggs (without the shell) in the mixer, use a low speed for a about minute or more until you'll obtain a
consistent dough like this:
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| It has not to be nice, it has to be good. |
Now the dough has to rest for 30 minutes, during this time you can wash the mixer, prepare an excellent sauce for the pasta. Yo can cover it with a piece of cloth, this way it's repaired from animals, children and
curious clumsy.
I had no time to prepare sauce, so I used a ready to use sauce "amatriciana" flavor:
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| Tomatoes, ham and roman sheep cheese: I love it |
After past rest, you can use it in a pasta machine... What is a pasta machine? It's an old fashion machine that every grandmother has somewhere in the roof that permit you to thin the dough and cut it. You can buy one manual model at very low price:
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| My pasta machine |
Start using the pasta machine with half or less of the dough, set the thickness to the bigger value, put it in the thinner and turn the crank:
If the dough is too sticky, add some flour.
Continue to thinner the foil to at least 4mm or less:
Now you can use the cutting part of the pasta machine. During this example I made
"fettucine". Put the foil in the cutting part and
turn the crank:
Use flour to avoid pasta will stick one on another. Repeat all steps for the other parts of the dough and you'll obtain your pasta ready to cook:
Now put it in the boiling water:
Few minutes and it's ready: about 3-5 minutes, taste it at regular intervals and decide when drain it.
Mix your sauce and the result will be this:
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| A good dish |
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| An happy dinner |
Enjoy!
