This weekend I took a break from my newly estab­lished ritual bread baking to try my hand at home-made pasta. I’ve seen it done sev­eral times on tele­vi­sion and in person. Recently, I have been reading Bill Buford’s “Heat” and have been inspired to try it myself. Pasta is easily my favorite food item; I feel an oblig­a­tion to know how to make my own.

The Recipe

Once again, I con­sulted the bible. Pasta dough is very simple. No fancy ingre­di­ents are required. All it takes is flour and egg. A little salt is added for flavor. You can add some oil (if you like) to make the dough easier to work and (in the case of a fine extra virgin oil) add some flavor. Water is used to adjust the level of mois­ture. The ratio of flour to egg is roughly one egg for every quarter-pound (~112 grams) of flour, which results in a healthy serving of pasta. I used 3 eggs and mea­sured 337 grams of flour which made more than enough for two people (I have leftovers).

Making the Dough

Fol­lowing the direc­tions, I mixed some salt into my flour and then added my (very slightly beaten) eggs. Starting with a spatula and then switching to my hands, I com­bined the two until the dough would take no more flour. There was quite a bit of flour left over, but my eggs were small and prob­ably didn’t pro­vide the cor­rect amount of mois­ture. I added enough water so that all the remaining flour was incor­po­rated and the dough was just soft enough to knead. I was a little wor­ried that I was over-working the dough, but it did even­tu­ally become smooth, con­sis­tent, and elastic. At that point I stopped, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and let it rest for an hour.

When it was time to roll, I sep­a­rated the dough into halves so I would have enough rolling room. This was when I real­ized how elastic the dough had become. It was slightly dif­fi­cult to sep­a­rate. Rolling the dough with a stan­dard wooden rolling pin was a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge. I was con­cerned that I would break either the rolling pin han­dles or the portable kitchen island on which I work. The dough was so stretchy that it would shrink back every time I rolled it out. Even­tu­ally, I achieved a thick­ness I was happy with and, using a knife, cut the dough in to thick pieces of fet­tucine. Enough flour had adhered to the sur­face during the rolling that I did not have to worry about indi­vidual noo­dles sticking together.

Cooking

Water and lots of salt. The noo­dles plump up when you put them into boiling water. This is where I real­ized that my dough had not been rolled thin enough. A pasta roller would have been a big help, but I didn’t want to buy one without having tried to make pasta at least once. Because the pasta was thick, it required a longer cooking time than what would be normal for fresh pasta (mine took 5 or 6 min­utes, double what the bible rec­om­mends). I fin­ished the pasta in my sauce – a mush­room cream sauce with bacon and peas. Despite the extra cooking time, the noo­dles stood up very well to the sauce, remaining toothy and main­taining a good tex­ture. They were also very filling.

The Eco­nomics

A 1 lb. box of cheap dry pasta will cost around $1.20 at the super­market. To make my pasta, I used some pretty good ingre­di­ents. I pur­chased King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour on sale from Whole Foods ($4.50 for 5 lbs.). The eggs were not organic, but they were ‘no-antibiotics’ eggs from free-range hens ($3.80 per dozen). I used 3 eggs ($0.95) and 3/4 lb. of flour ($0.68) for a a total of about $1.63 for 3/4 lb. of pasta. This works out to about $2.17 per lb. More expen­sive than the cheap dry pasta, but much less expen­sive than a sim­ilar size package of fresh pasta from some­place like Weg­mans or Whole Foods, and likely made using much better ingre­di­ents. And while you can argue that I have not fac­tored in the labor required to make the pasta, I still think the money saved over store-bought fresh pasta and increase in eating sat­is­fac­tion jus­tify the extra work involved. I’m def­i­nitely going to buy dry pasta much less often.

Pasta makes me happy. It has since I can remember. When I was growing up, our family had a set number of dif­ferent meals, and pasta with meat sauce was always my favorite one. I love mac and cheese, chicken noodle soup, 牛肉麵, lasagna, dumplings… I can’t begin to convey how happy it makes me to be able to have my pasta. I should have tried this a long time ago. But better late than ever.

Now, it is time to suc­cumb to a con­tented pasta food coma.