Inspired by my latest favouritist blog, The Art of Doing Stuff, I made pasta for the first time today. And, oh yay, it was spectacularly great tasting despite the ineptness of the pasta maker.
Beginning with, How to make pasta dough, I made one substitution and used semolina instead of regular flour. Working with two eggs, it did not take long to mix and kneading was a breeze. I even made use of a wood board we’d been given by Mutti many moons ago. The final dough ball just looked just like the piture at the bottom of the instructions.
While the dough rested, I set up my pasta machine. I purchased the machine a while ago at a local garage sale for a couple of dollars and this was its first outing in this house. I had to set up on the dining table as the counter top in our decrepit kitchen was too wide to clamp the machine to. I laid down some parchment paper to protect both the wood table top and the pasta.
The instructions, How to use a pasta machine, were easy to follow, though it turns out my machine counts from 8 down and I found levels 2 and 1 so super fine it was impossible to stop the pasta ribbon from tearing. The cutting rollers worked a treat and I used the wide setting since this was my first attempt and that seemed easier to deal with.
Fresh pasta, it turns out, really likes to stick to itself so my ribbons of pasta began to clump up before I realised what was happening. (So next time I’ll spread the lengths out after I’ve cut them.) Nevertheless I dumped my pile of pasta into some boiling water for about 4 minutes.
For sauce we winged it. We both used a little extra virgin olive oil. Nic then added some fresh parmesan while I added a little salt and freshly ground pepper.
It was way delish!
I will definitely do this again plus I’m now super keen to put my ravioli cutters to good use.
Current temperature: here 34F/1C, there 2C/36F
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