Homemade Pasta

I’ve written about homemade pasta dough before, back when I made cheese buttons (and the cheese to fill them with) while pregnant with Ezra.  I made a lot of pasta during the pregnancy, maybe once a week during the second trimester fit of efficiency and energy.  I’ve made a lot less since having a second child in the house though.  But every time I do make it I’m reminded that it really isn’t that much work.  And it is a whole world away from store bought pasta.

I love my atlas pasta machine, it requires hand cranking but with the help of one 3-nearly-4-year-old who loves cranking it, we turn out pasta very quickly.

For this batch I modified the recipe a bit, and it ended up like this:

• 1-1/2 cups white flour
• 1-1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/4 cup wheat bran
• 1/4 cup wheat germ
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup carrot puree
• 1/2 tsp salt
• a dash of olive oil

What really keeps pasta making from being time consuming is the use of electric kitchen appliances.  I dearly love my food processor and my stand mixer.  In the food processor I pulse the dry ingredients until they’re blended then add the wet ingredients.  I pulse everything until the dough looks something like moist bread crumbs.  Basically, stop pulsing before you get one large mass of dough.  Then I dump everything in the stand mixer with the dough hook and let it do its thing for a few minutes.  Pasta dough should be kneeded a little, so the stand mixer does most of it, but I usually quarter the dough and kneed the individual pieces a few times before putting on a plate under an upturned bowl.  I let the dough rest for 20 minutes (or refrigerate for later in an airtight container) before rolling it out in the pasta machine.

I usually hang it on a string stretched over our sink (the only space in our kitchen that I can do this, but over the sink isn’t ideal) after I’ve got the noodles, but tossing the cut noodles with some flour and leaving them on a tray works too.  I have no set amount of time I leave them there, basically I just make the pasta whenever it is most convenient during the day (usually boy-o’s nap time) and then leave it until I’m ready to pop it in the pot.  And the result?  Yum.  Yum, yum.  Or “tasty!” if you’re Junah.