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Homemade Pasta By Either Using A Pasta Maker Or Hand Cut

Oh my God nothing like working on a post to the music of Mr. Excitement himself Jackie Wilson. I have been a huge fan of his since I was a tiny baby. Naturally I was born in 1963 and times where a lot simpler then. Kennedy was president when I was born. My dad told me about the costs of groceries and the other costs of living was a lot lower and better quality besides less stressful. I remember how much things had cost when my daughters where small. When my dad said that we don’t need the bag now and it is right on the money because we don’t.

I am lucky if I can get bags of flour, a bottle of oil and a carton of eggs to make the pasta itself. The price of cooking gas to use to boil the water and for other methods of cooking is expensive too as well. Above are the photos of the methods on how to make pasta that we are going to discuss. However we are not going to leave a lasagna link at all because even though I made the pasta sheets from scratch but we are going to talk about this dough again and then we are just going to focus on the noodle part of the post.

For the dough you will need 1/2 cup each of all purpose unbleached flour and wheat flour. You may substitue this for amaranth, buckwheat, barley, millet or oat flours too. The purely optional ingredients are either 1 pinch of tomato powder, spinach powder, or beetroot powder for the color if you wish. They can be obtained on Amazon and the beetroot powder I have is by Now Foods. The spinach powder I have is by Hooshier Hill Farms. The tomato powder I have is by Auguson Farms. Add also 1 pinch of pink salt, kosher salt or plain sea salt, 3 pinches of gluten in the flour mixture. Gluten is by Bob’s Red Mill. Add these to the bowl and make a well in the middle and 1 handful of nido or other type of powder milk and 1 egg. Mix this and add 1/4 cup of water a little at a time until you make a firm dough. Coat the dough itself with 3 tbs of either olive, corn, canola, almond, sesame, vegetable or grapeseed oil. Knead until the dough is pliable which should be at least for 2 minutes. Let sit for 20 minutes.

Take a large pot and fill it up with water. Add 1 pinch of pink salt and 3 tbs of water. It shold hold 1 gallon or 4 liters of water and set it on the stove with the lid on it to bring the water to a rapid boil quickly on high heat. It should take about 10 minutes tops.

Now take your dough and break it up in to bigger then marble pieces about the size of golfball should do at the max. Place the all purpose unbleached flour in a bag and add the piece of dough to it and shake it up to coat the dough. Now with the rolling pin and the hand cranked pasta machine you can place to crank in the first hole which makes the pasta sheets after you use the vice to secure it to either the edge of the table or the counter space and have this tray right next to the hand cranked pasta maker if you are using this type.

This is made in Italy and it can not be immersed in water and can’t get wet at all. It has to be cleaned with a clean dry cloth only. Preferably a dry dish cloth does the trick nicely. There is the dial from where you can set it to any number you like and use this dough and crank away until it is flat. Make sure you do not make it too thin because it will tear easily. From here you can attatch the other piece on and the wide set is used for making tagetelle and linguini. closed set one is for making spaghetti, vermacelli, and angel hair. The pasta sheets can be used besides lasagna and cut in to medium squares for making ravioli. We will cover ravioli in a feature post Insshallah. I made it before but I never taken a picture of it. It turned out good too.

You can also roll the dough out in a pasta sheet by using a rolling pin. Just roll it out thin and use like I just suggested above or cut in to wide or thin pieces of noodles for making casseroles or goulash. To cut these you will need a sharp knife or a pizza cutter. The two pictures you see of the screw type pasta maker is Chinese. It can be washed out with soap and water to clean and you can unscrew both ends and oil it with cooking oil on the inside or spray with cooking spray so dough doesn’t stick. Plus flouring the pieces of dough helps a lot too.

Now you can take the pieces of dough and put it in the cyllinder and screw the type of pasta attachment of your choosing at one end and the screw type apperatus on the other and make sure this is all the way up and then when it is in place start screwing it all the way and then the pasta you want to make is coming out the other end in to the boiling water. You may need to snip the pasta off by using a pair of kitchen shears.

For hand cranked pasta and handcut pasta you can drop in to the boiling water after each and every piece of dough you used to tansform in to homemade pasta. Repeat this process until all of the pieces of dough is used up and do not forget when the pasta is done it will float to the top. Take this pasta here and add this or create new recipes with it and I hope you will enjoy this.

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