Monday 10 December 2012

Home Made Pasta Recipe

3 egg yolks
70g pasta flour (more or less depending on size of yolks)
Salt (if you want but I prefer just to cook in salty water)

Put the yolks in a bowl. Add the flour slowly mixing with your hands as you do (bit messy but the gunk comes off your hands as you add more flour). You need to mix quite hard to get the flour mixed in. Keep going until you get a dough with a consistancy like play doh (if you can remember what that is like). It should be pretty firm, but when you form it in to a ball and squeeze it, it should not crumble. If you add a bit too much flour and the ball crumbles add a little water. Probably the easiest way to get the feel of what the dough should be like is to keep adding flour until the dough becomes a little crumbly then add a little water. Then the next time stop adding flour when the dough is like this.

Push the soft part of a finger against the dough, at this point it should leave a dent.
Start kneeding the dough, if it sticks to surface then you have not got enough flour in it so work in a bit more.
Kneed for 10 mins. I am not sure if you could do this with a food mixer with dough blades (Rob) as the dough is much harder than bread dough and I think it might just bounce around.
Push a finger against the dough again and it should spring back and not leave much of a dent. If this isn't the case keep kneeding.

Leave the dough to rest for 10 mins (or more) then roll it out as thin as you can (1mm perhaps), you should be able to see through it a little. It shouldn't be very sticky at this stage, if it is then the dough was probably to wet, this time flour it well so it doesn't stick to stuff and next time make the dough drier with more flour.

Now shape as you want, for tagliatteli you can flour the sheet of pasta, roll it up and then cut slices of the width you want the tagliatteli to be, then mix them around a bit and they will unroll ready for cooking.
You can also use a pasta maker to do the cutting if you have one. I find it easier to make the dough as above rather than using the machine then if I want spagetti or neat looking tagliatteli I use the machine for cutting. You need to make sure the pasta sheet is well floured. It is quite hard work rolling it out with a rolling pin so you can use the machine for rolling too.
Or you can make ravioli, tortillini of lots of other things.
These make good ravioli as long as you make sure the sheets of pasta are damp where they are meant to be sticking together. I got mine from Lakeland.
Cook in plenty of salty water for a few minutes until done.


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