Easy Fresh Pasta

Quick and easy pasta recipe for fresh. home made egg pasta.

Serves: 2

Prep time: 60-90 mins

Ingredients

145g plain flour

1 whole egg + 1 egg yolk

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp salt

Sieve the flour into a large mixing bowl and create a small well in the middle.
Add the whole egg and the other yolk, and olive oil and the salt
Combine with a slow electric whisk until the mixture loose and crumbly but consistent.
Lightly flour a work surface and tip the mixture onto it.
Knead the mixture thoroughly, adding light sprinkles of water as needed, until it forms a smooth but tough dough.
Wrap the dough in clingfilm and leave in a cupboard for 45mins.

Lightly flour the work surface again, then remove the dough from the clingfilm.
Using a floured rolling pin, roll the dough until it is an even thickness just less than 1cm.
Flour the large rollers of the pasta machine, move the width to ‘1’, and start feeding the dough through the rollers.
Repeat this process, working up the settings, until you achieve the desired thickness:
Keep the pasta folded neatly when it exits the rollers, but keep an eye on it to make sure the rollers are not obstructed.
To prevent the dough from sticking to the machine or to itself, keep it lightly floured.
For most pasta, a thickness of 4-5 will be fine, but the ideal thickness of filled pasta dough is achieved then you can see through t slightly. This would be nearer 1-3.
If making filled pasta, cut and prepare immediately as the thin pasta sheet will dry out very quickly.
If cutting long pasta, such as linguine or fettuccine, move the roller handle to the desired cutter, and carefully feed the pasta sheet through, keeping it floured to prevent the cut pasta sticking to each other.
Flour the just-cut pasta, and place on a rack to hang freely so it doesn’t clump together. The top of an opened cupboard door works just well for this purpose.
The pasta can be cooked immediately at this point or can be dried and stored for up to 2 days.

Boil a pan of deep water, add a generous pinch of salt and pepper and a dash of olive oil.
Place the pasta into the pan, stirring enough to keep it separated, but not so much that is begins to break.
For an ‘al dente’ cook, boil the freshly made pasta for approx. 1 minute, testing it to your preference. For pasta that’s been stored, it may need a little longer.

Finally… serve, and enjoy.

A conventional pasta machine is not necessary; pasta can be fully hand-rolled and cut – the pasta machine is just designed to make this process easier and more accurate. Additionally, for making spaghetti etc., many off-the-shelf mincers have attachments to achieve this very successfully. Just feed the rested pasta dough into the machine, and flour the cut pasta as it comes out to stop it sticking.
I hope you find this recipe easy-to-follow and successful, but if you have any issues or suggested alterations, please get in touch. I am always open to innovating my recipes!