How to make fresh egg pasta

Frank11 September 2009pasta, reference36 Comments

Fresh egg pasta, variously known in Italian as pasta fresca or pasta fatta in casa or pasta all’uovo, is one of the pillars of Italian cookery. Given the poor quality of most store bought fresh pasta—not to mention the price—every would be Italian cook should really learn to make it at home as part of their ‘basic training’. Yes, it’s a multistep process, but once you get the hang of it, it’s really not hard at all. You’ll be rolling out fresh egg pasta to your heart’s content in less than an hour.

I usually make life easy for myself by using my trusty standing mixer to form and knead the pasta dough. Then I use the pasta attachments to roll out and cut the dough into various pasta shapes. That said, there are other methods, as explained below.

Ingredients

An easy to remember rule of thumb is, for each person to use:

1 egg
100g (1 cup) flour

These are just rules of thumb, however. Your actual results will depend on the exact size of the egg, the quality of the flour, even the humidity in the air. So be prepared to adjust as you go along.

To make the rolling and cutting easier later on, you can add a drop of oil to the dough, although purists frown on this.

Directions

Making the dough using a standing mixer

Pour the flour into the mixing bowl with a pinch of salt and the egg(s) and oil if using. Attach the dough paddle (see photo above).

Turn on the mixer mix at slow speed (setting 1 or 2) until the the eggs are well incorporated. The dough may look rather crumbly at this point, but not to worry.

Switch to the dough hook and continue to mix. At first continue at a slow speed, then turn it up a notch to a moderate speed (setting 3 or 4) until the dough sticks to the hook and forms a smooth surfaced, uniform ball, like so:

Ideally, the dough should be pliable but not at all tacky. You may need to make adjustments. If you find the ball is very sticky and wet, add a bit more flour until the dough becomes firmer. If on the other hand dough is too dry to form a ball, add a bit of water.

Using a food processor

You can use more or less the same method for making pasta dough in a normal food processor. Add you ingredients to the processor bowl and pulse until they form a ball, making adjustments if need be as described above.

Hand kneading

You can also form the dough the old-fashioned way, entirely by hand. Pour the flour in a mound on a spianatoia or other dry surface. Make a well in the middle of the flour.

Add your eggs, salt and oil into this well. With a fork, begin to whisk the ingredients in the well, incorporating the flour at the sides of the well little by little.

When the mixture get too dense to mix with your fork, begin to use your hands. Incorporate more and more of the flour until you have a pliable ball of dough.

Place the dough on a pasta board (spianatoia) or other dry surface and knead it by hand for a few minutes until the dough has reached the right consistency, smooth and pliable and yet still firm. (If you find that the dough is too wet, sprinkle it with flour and knead the additional flour into the dough.)

Resting the dough

Allow the dough to rest for 30 minutes wrapped in plastic wrap or a plastic bag. This rest will ‘relax’ the dough and make it much easier to work with. (If you short on time, it is not an absolutely necessary step.)

Rolling out the dough

You can roll out the dough using the pasta roller attachment of your standing mixer, or a hand cranked pasta machine. Begin with the roller set at the widest setting.

Divide the dough into as many pieces as the number of eggs you used. Take one piece and flatten it out with your hand or a rolling pin. Then pass it through the roller, which will turn the dough ball into a rather thick sheet.

Fold this sheet in two and let it go through the roller yet again. If need be, lightly flour it so it doesn’t stick to the roller. Repeat as needed until the pasta has reached a smooth consistency.

When the pasta is smooth, turn the roller to the next, slightly narrower setting. Keep passing the pasta sheet through successively narrower settings, one by one, until you reach the thickness you need for the type of pasta you’re making. Flour as needed to prevent sticking.

Repeat the process with the other pieces of dough, which you will have kept wrapped in plastic so they don’t dry out.

Drying the pasta

For most kinds of pasta, lay out the pasta sheet to dry on a towel or (my preferred method) on a drying rack. The rack will allow air to flow on both sides of the pasta, so it will dry more quickly and evenly. If using a towel, it’s a good idea to turn the sheets over every once and while so they dry evenly.

The pasta is dry enough when it feels ‘leathery’ to the touch but not brittle. You need to use some judgment here. If the pasta isn’t dry enough, the pasta will tend to stick together when you cut the sheet. Pasta that’s too dry, on the other hand, is unworkable. (If you notice that splits are beginning to open on the sides of the pasta sheets, then it is getting too dry. But if you act quickly enough, you can still use the dough.) With some practice (and a few inevitable misfires) recognizing the right degree of dryness will become second-nature.

[NB: For stuffed pastas like ravioli, you do not want to allow the pasta to dry, but rather you need to work the rolled out pasta as quickly as possible. The pasta should remain moist, so that the top and bottom of each pasta ‘pillow’ sticks together.]

Cutting the pasta

Once dried to the right point, pass the pasta sheets through the cutting attachment of your mixer or pasta ‘machine’.

My KitchenAid standing mixer pasta set, as well as most pasta ‘machines’, come with two cutting attachments, one for thin pasta like spaghetti or taglierini and one for ribbon pasta like tagliatelle or fettuccine. (The one for thin pasta will be the roller with cutting blades at narrow intervals looking something like a comb.)

You’ll need to cut other pasta shapes by hand. For lasagne, for example, you can just cut the pasta sheet into lengths of say 15cm (6 inches).

As the pasta sheet passes through the roller, catch the strands of pasta with your open hand and gently hold them up so they do not fold onto each other. Lay the stands out on a floured surface (or back on the rack).

Depending how thick the pasta sheets are, it is possible that some of the strands will stick together. If this happens, then you can just gently pull the strands apart. It’s a bit tedious but not too difficult.

Notes

Specific pasta types

The above are ‘generic’ instructions for making fresh egg pasta, good for just about any shape of egg pasta you’ll want to make.

Refer to the recipes on this blog for specific instructions on how thin to roll out your pasta sheets, and on how wide or narrow to cutt particular types of fresh pasta.

Choosing the right flour

The best kind of flour for making most kinds of fresh egg pasta is “OO”. It is made with a soft wheat (farina di grano tenero) that has been very finely ground and all impurities removed. (In Italy, flours are categorized from “OO” to “O” to 1 and 2, going from the finest to the coarsest.) Farina OO gives the pasta a lovely texture, somewhat firm but not nearly as firm as store-bought pasta.

Farina “OO” is available in many Italian specialty stores, as well as (in the US) online. If you can’t find this kind of flour, regular ‘all purpose’ flour will do. Some cooks use a blend of all purpose and cake/pastry flour to try to approximate the texture of 00. Some cooks use pure pastry flour, which I have never tried but suspect would be too soft. But I have not experimented with alternatives, so I would not want to comment further.

There are other sorts of fresh pasta that require other sorts of flour. Orecchiette, for example, are made with a blend of semolina and all purpose flour. One of my favorite winter pastas, pizzoccheri, are made with a mixture of buckwheat and white flours. Individual recipes on this website will specify the kinds of flour to use. But, unless specified otherwise, you can assume that 00 is the flour you should prefer.

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