When my parents were here, my mom and I embarked on the adventure of making some home-made fresh egg pasta. Since I don’t have a pasta machine, we did everything old school, rolling out the dough with a rollling pin, and then cutting the noodles – tagliatelle – with a knife. Pasta dough is much harder than pizza dough, and even if my mom is an expert and makes fresh pasta quite often, the whole old-school rolling proved quite a workout.
We decided to make enough pasta for 5 people to eat, plus we had some leftovers for my boyfriend to take to work for lunch the following day. The proportions I’m listing in the recipe below can be easily halved to make enough for 2-3 people if you don’t want to make as much as we did.
In this recipe I am combining durum semolina with regular all purpose flour. “Real” pasta should be 100% durum semolina wheat flour, but the use of 50% regular flour does not affect the taste in any way to me. The reason why I’m using a blend of two flours is simply because I follow a family recipe. I would not recommend, in any case, to use only all purpose flour to make pasta. It needs to have some durum semolina in it.
If bolognese is not your thing why not try this creamy walnut sauce?
Use fresh pasta with fresh tomato and balsamico onion pasta sauce!
Fresh egg pasta
Ingredients
- 300 g durum semolina
- 300 g all purpose wheat flour
- 6 eggs
- 1/4 cup water
- 3 tbsp olive oil (optional)
Instructions
- Combine the two flours and make a mound with a well in the centre.
- Crack the eggs in the centre of the flour mound.
- Slightly beat the eggs with a fork or directly with your hands and from there start to knead, incorporating the eggs and flour into a dough.
- If you feel that the dough is too dry to come together, add the water little by little. Depending on the size of the eggs you may not have to use any water at all, or all of it.
- Add the olive oil to the dough and keep kneading. As a general rule, you want to add it like you added the water, little by little. Do not add it if the dough is already sticky. It needs to feel elastic and compact.
- Roll out the dough (by hand or using a pasta machine) until about 1 mm thick. If doing everything by hand, it is easier to divide the dough into smaller balls (we made 5) and roll those out separately.
- If cutting by hand: Let pasta sheets sit for 15 minutes under a generous sprinkle of flour. Roll each sheet over itself, creasing it loosely so that it won't break where it bends. Add more flour if needed, as long as you avoid any sticking. To make tagliatelle, cut the rolled dough every 5 mm. Unroll the pasta coils and let them sit all ruffled and airy on some more flour.
- Cook in salted boiling water for 3-4 minutes. If not cooking immediately, I recommend adding even more flour and moving the pasta around often to prevent it from sticking. If you have the possibility to hang it to dry that is the best way to prevent sticking.
More pasta sauce inspo: home-made basil pesto.
Season the cooked fresh egg pasta with any sauce of choice. Making both the pasta and the sauce from scratch requires time and commitment, but it so worth it from time to time. This makes you really taste the difference and feel like being at a restaurant. Time spent making real food is never wasted. Buon appetito.
😱 it looks so good! I’ve never made my own pasta, but this is very tempting!
It takes some effort but then you can really taste the difference. I’m too lazy to do this every weekend, though 😛
This looks wonderful, Eva! Homemade pasta is so beautiful!
So true! I loved photographing it, it has such a beautiful texture!
It certainly does! There is something about Italian food that is so beautiful … I think because it is made with such love.
Looks delicious! Once I made past at home. No, I should say I have TRIED MAKING home-made pasta. I don’t have a pasta machine either so I used a rolling pin. The result was … it was too thick. It was very hard to roll out dough. Maybe it was too hard and I should’ve used more egg or something. I should challenge it again. .
A little bit more water should do the trick. And yeah, you really have to work hard with the rolling pin. It is a real workout for your arms 😀