Today was a lucky day. When I went to crack the eggs for my homemade pasta, I found that three of the four had double yolks! Have you ever experienced this before? Isn't it supposed to be good luck or something?
All tangents aside, homemade pasta is one of those things that everyone must make at least once during their lifetimes. Now, don't get me wrong, I love dried pasta equally and I feel like in most applications it's actually better. For example, spaghetti and meatballs, spaghetti carbonara, spaghetti anything--I would never make fresh spaghetti...what's the point? But for something like pappardelle or ravioli, it's gotta be fresh, hands down.
Dough recipe adapted from David Lebovitz
Notes:
Find Part I here
Find Part III here
You can make the dough in a machine, but I find that it's so much more rewarding after putting in at least 10 minutes of elbow-greasing, hand-cramping, soul-crushing kneading action (I'm just kidding on that last one).
I like to use a mix of all-purpose and semolina flours as I find the semolina gives the pasta a good bite that you don't get with 100% all-purpose. Unfortunately the semolina also makes the dough more difficult to knead. You can of course adjust the ratio of flours to your heart's fancy.
Yields about 24 oz of dough.
Ingredients:
7 oz all-purpose flour
7 oz semolina flour
4 large eggs (or 3 large eggs + 3 egg yolks for a richer pasta)
1 tsp olive oil
Instructions - for the dough:
Mix the flours and create a mound on your countertop. Create a well in the middle and add in eggs and oil. Using your fingers, lightly mix the eggs and oil together, then in a circular motion start slowly drawing in the flour. Continue drawing in more flour until it becomes difficult to mix with your fingers. Then, taking your pastry scraper, gather the dough into a ball and start kneading. It will be very shaggy at this point, but don't worry it'll come together with a lot of kneading and love!
Knead, knead, knead with the heel of your palm. It will take approximately 10 minutes to come together. While kneading, if you find that the dough is so moist it sticks to your hand, sprinkle a little flour on it and keep going, repeat until the dough is still moist but not sticky. If it's too dry, wet your fingers with a little bit of water and proceed the same way.
Once your dough is smooth and springy, you're pretty much done. Just place it on the counter, slap a bowl over it, and let it rest for at least an hour.
Instructions - for the pappardelle noodles:
Cut your dough into four even pieces. Liberally flour each piece. Set your pasta machine to the lowest setting and take each piece through. Continue increasing the setting, taking your dough through each time. Stop just a few short before the highest setting. On an Atlas, this would be #7 (out of 9).
Flour the sheets of pasta. Take each sheet and cut in half, now you'll have eight sheets of pasta that are 1/2 the length of the original four, this makes it more manageable to work with. Fold each sheet in half, then in half again. Taking a sharp knife, cut the pasta lengthwise at about 1/2 to 2/3 inch increments. Unfurl the pasta, flour it, and repeat until all the sheets have been cut into pappardelle ribbons.
For the chicken noodle soup, you'll use about 1/3 of the noodles you've made (8 oz), so generously flour the rest and store in the fridge for future use.