Homemade pasta recipe

Fresh pasta is pretty expensive stuff, which is surprising considering the list of necessary ingredients:

• flour (cheap);
• water (cheaper).

It's the other ingredients, the secret ones, that prevents many people from having more fresh pasta in their lives:

• know-how (available here);
• elbow grease (provide your own, please).

Hopefully, by the end of this article, everyone that reads it will be able to combine the know-how and easy, inexpensive ingredients to make their own fresh, homemade pasta from scratch.

The two practical things that you have to know if you're going to make pasta are how to make dough and how to shape it into pasta.  The recipe is simple, though it varies slightly based on the kind of pasta one is trying to make:

Ingredients:

1. Unbleached all-purpose flour, perhaps of the King Arthur brand, available at grocery stores pretty much everywhere;
2. Water, in a roughly 3 parts to 1 part ratio, by volume;
3. A pinch of salt, optional.

Method:

Start heating some salted water to boil before you even start to make the dough.  Then combine the ingredients in a bowl and work the ingredients together until a dough starts to form.  Turn that dough out onto a clean countertop and knead (apply "elbow grease" liberally here) for about 10 minutes, unless you're going to try to make long noodles, in which case you've got another 30-40 minutes of kneading in front of you and need to add more water, somewhere close to a 5-to-2 or even 2-to-1 ratio of flour to water, by volume.  For most pasta needs, you want a relatively firm dough.  Let that dough rest, and you'll be ready to make pasta with it.

Turning that ball of dough into a pasta requires you to somehow shape it.  Remember: gourmet-good food doesn't have to have an elaborate, difficult shape.  A simple way to make the ball of dough into pasta is to simply "shave" off strips of the dough directly into the pan of boiling water.  This, in Chinese, is called dao xiao mian (knife-shaved pasta) and is typical in home cooking and is typical even in good restaurants.  A video demoing the shaving process is available on YouTube here.  It's very pleasant with red sauce or with meats as well as with Asian fried dishes.

Alternatively, that dough can be rolled out (careful for sticking!) into sheets for lasagne, and these sheets do not need to be boiled before being used in a recipe. It can also be pinched into little orichetti (ear shaped) pasta, a bit like thick medium shells without ridges on them.  It can also be rolled into logs and sliced into little nuggets to make a shape like that of gnocchi (rolling a fork over them once cut will create the ridges to help hold a sauce to them better).  The dough can also be rolled out thin and sliced into fettuccini or less carefully into "pasta rags," which have an interesting and variable shape and mouthfeel and are popular in rustic-chic kinds of soups and ragouts.  Of course, one could invest in a pasta extruder to create longer noodles like spaghetti.

For a gourmet flair, as the author has done and presented on his blog, The Untrained Gourmet, in this post, freshly made vegetable juices can be added to the recipe, "replacing some, most, or all of the water," to create vibrantly colored, nutritionally enriched, flavored pasta.  A vegetable juicing machine is required for this, though.

Other options include subsituting some whole wheat flour for the regular flour, noting that it is a bit more thirsty, or adding powdered herbs, for instance a half teaspoon of powdered rosemary leaves is very nice, particularly when the sauce has a basalmic vinegar base.  For a result that's more reminiscent of "usual" pasta, about a third of the flour can be substituted out for "pasta flour," which would be durum or semolina flours. 

Buy it locally!  The Hodgson Mill brand makes a good semolina flour that is available online here or, for example, at The Fresh Market and Earth Fare locations in Knoxville and occasionally at Knoxville-area grocery stores.  The other ingredients are all widely available in the Knoxville area and should be easy to obtain.

The author cooks with this pasta frequently, particularly the shaved noodles, and many recipes can be found on his blog, particularly under the tag "Pasta."  Give them a try!