Adventures in Pasta Making

This is more of a show and tell in the trials and pitfalls of making fresh egg pasta.... we foolishly tried to make our first pasta on New Years Eve thinking that really it wouldn't take that long. How wrong we were! Essentially it took us 5 hours from starting out to actually sitting down to eat.... ok so we were making and eating appetizers and starters and drinking in between all the various stages of making the pasta and we were complete novices but 5 hours! Hopefully next time we could knock a dish out in 3 hours maximum. Saying all that it was great fun and really opens up the world of pasta to you. Now that we have made ordinary pasta we can go on and experiment more - chocolate pasta anyone?

Well first off the ingredients - we chose to follow the Locatelli way:

Fresh Egg Pasta

Makes about 400g

300g ‘00’ pasta flour
3 large eggs, plus 2 large egg yolks, at room temperature


We found these quantities far too much for one meal for four say.... We only used half the dough and then still found we had made far too much. Still when you are going to all that effort to make the pasta you probably need to make this amount and just eat pasta for the next couple of days.

• On a nice clean work surface mound your flour up and make a well in the flour to put your eggs in. Add a pinch of salt to the flour.
• Gradually add your eggs and mix into the flour - I found having a helper to crack the eggs whilst you make a mess with egg and flour mix is very useful. Now I found that I had used too few eggs and had to add another.... probably because the eggs were not big enough... you just have to have a few eggs on standby. Note that the recipe says 3 large eggs!
• Work it into a dough - I found this took me about 10 minutes with about 5 minutes of extra kneading... The result should be something like below.
• Divide the dough into 2 and wrap each half in a damp tea towel. Let them rest for about an hour.

Now to the rolling out of the pasta....

• Take one of the halves and roll into a 1 cm thick piece..... it helps to bear in mind the size of your pasta maker so attempt to make it slightly rectangular.
• Now to the endless rolling your pasta out....
• Pass your dough through on the thickest setting. Below was our fist roll through.... note the irregular shape.... don't worry too much if it does look like this... it can easily be saved. If need be take the knife to it.

• Keep putting the dough through reducing the settings down on each pass through - about 2-3 times.
• Next fold the pasta back in on itself and pass through 2-3 times reducing the setting on each pass through. This is the result after the folding and one pass through.

• Now cut that strip in half and place one half under a damp cloth. Now the idea is to pass the strip through the pasta maker the other way round to help give the pasta a more even consistency. Taking your strip fold it into 3, bringing 1 end in and the other over the top of that and roll out to about 5mm.. bearing in mind you want to put it in width ways now.
• Keep passing it through 2-3 times reducing the setting each time.
• Finally fold the pasta in on itself and pass through 2-3 times again reducing the setting each time until you get a sheet about 1.5mm thick.
• You are now ready to make it into tagliatelle or whatever you want... we made tordelli - large straight-edged ravioli. Putting our filling on one half the pasta sheet as below and brushing egg around the filling.

• You then fold over your pasta sheet as below.

• Gently dab your fingers around the edges of the filling to ensure the pasta sticks together and forms nice parcels.
• Slice up and you are ready to go and cook them. As you can see we had 8 tordelli from just one quarter of the pasta dough we produced.

Seeing this was our first attempt we had few problems.... there was a slight worry when the dough was not coming together but by having some water in a bowl to dip my hands into I managed to get the dough to the correct consistency. It did take forever.... but it was an accomplishment well deserved.