I love making pasta. It’s easy, cheap, and pretty fast.  It doesn’t really take that much skill to master the basics and there’s a lot of room for error because getting it a little too wet or dry is easy to recover from.  When I was in professional kitchens we didn’t make fresh pasta that often because it’s hard for most small kitchens to keep up with that kind of volume.  But we definitely did it more than a few times because we wanted something special.  Most highend restaurants buy their fresh pasta and it gets frozen quite a bit as well.  And they do it the same way I’m doing it here.  They cook it in advance and then just heat it up when they get an order.

Special equipment: 

• Pasta roller – You can technically do without it, but it’s really hard to roll pasta out evenly with a rolling pin.
• Stand mixer – Optional, but nice.

Ingredients:

• 1 cups AP flour
• 1 teaspoons salt
• 1 large eggs
• 1 tablespoons olive oil

Of course, you can multiply this out. If you use 2 cups of flour, use 2 eggs, 2t salt, 2T oil. And, so on.

Method:

1. Combine the flour and salt.
2. Mix the eggs and oil together.
3. Use a stand mixer (or a spoon) to mix the eggs and oil with the flour mix until it comes together.
4. Add water, 1 tablespoon at a time, just until the dough will hold together when squeezed. (If you’re going to err, err slightly on the wet side.)
5. Dump onto a lightly floured surface and knead until it comes together. Use a sprinkling of water if the dough is too dry.

At this point, you can wrap the dough and let it rest in the fridge for an hour, but it’s not required.

Shaping:

1. Cut off a piece about the size of your palm, and put it through the pasta roller at setting 1.
2. Fold it in half, and send it through again. Lightly dust with flour as needed. Repeat this maybe 3 times, until the pasta starts looking smooth.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2, at setting 3.
4. Move to setting 5, and roll the dough out one more time.
5. Cut the dough to desired length.
6. Repeat steps 1-5 with the remaining dough pieces. Here, you can let it sit out to dry for 30-60 minutes if you like, or you can move on right away.
7. Send the dough through the fettuccine cutter, or the spaghetti cutter.
8. Dump all the dough in rapidly boiling water.
9. If you’re not going to eat it right away then shock it in ice water right away.