If you’ve looked through our recipes, you know we love pasta because there’s so many different vegetarian recipes you can make with it. We always use boxed noodles, but we recently got a pasta attachment for our stand mixer and decided to try it out. You can make pretty much any shape of pasta you want with this kind of attachment, but ultimately we went with some pappardelle, and we’ll show you how we did it.
To make this pasta, you’ll need:
- Flour
- Semolina flour
- 6 eggs
- Olive oil
First, sift together 2 cups of flour, 2 cups of semolina flour, and a little salt onto a clean, flat surface.
Make a well in the middle and crack six eggs into it.
Then add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and beat it with the eggs using a fork …
… and gradually incorporate the flours into it. Use your hands to knead everything together when the mixture starts getting thick, and to ensure that the dough doesn’t stick keep dusting it and your work surface with a mixture of both flours.
Knead the dough for about 8 minutes, then form it into a ball, wrap it in plastic, and set it aside for at least half an hour.
When you’re ready to make your noodles, divide the dough into four sections. Attach the regular pasta roller (not the crimped or notched ones – those are for different shapes) to your mixer and begin running each piece through to thin out the dough. You’re going to have to carefully run it through several times to get it thin enough for pasta. Make sure your don’t let your pasta sheets stick to themselves or each other.
You want your pasta dough to eventually roll out to about 1/16-inch thickness.
Then dust your work surface again with semolina flour and lay out the pasta sheets. Use the straight-edged side of a pasta cutter to slice it into noodles – since we were making pappardelle, ours were rather wide.
Dust the pasta in yet more semolina flour, so the noodles don’t stick to each other, and congratulations! You now have yourself some fresh, homemade pasta. You can either cook these right away – if you do, you only have to boil them for 5 minutes or so – or hang them to dry if you plan to use them later.
We’re going to be really honest here – these take some amount of work. Of course it’s easier to go out and buy a box of pasta, but fresh noodles do taste really good. Plus, you can think of it as an experience to make your own pasta, and after putting in all that effort you really get to enjoy the fruit of your labors.
So how did we cook these up? We’re going to show you next week what recipe we used these in, so check back soon to see one delicious way you can eat your homemade pasta!