How to Make Homemade Pasta

I had tried my hand at making homemade pasta a few times in the past, always ending up with sticky, dense, inedible doughy grossness. I swear I can follow recipes, but inevitably I would end up with a r/ExpectationVsReality scenario.

In my post Cooking Lessons I wrote about my experience taking a cooking lesson from a farm and winery in San Gimignano, Italy. As I typed that, I felt quite pretentious and heard my own voice saying, “Oh of course, all you have to do to make good homemade pasta is taking a pasta making lesson in Italy from a professional chef!”

Also, when looking up recipes online, I always just scroll to the bottom of the page for the measurements. Maybe that’s my folly, so let me jump to the point:

Homemade pasta is better when you use a special type of flour: Double Zero, Doppio Zero, or Tipo “00” flour. They’re all the same, and the name refers to a grading system of how finely the grain is ground. The chef teaching me and my husband said that you can make the pasta with normal flour, but you may need to reduce the quantity. I’ve been using this one from Amazon.

Regarding quantity, it’s super easy to remember, but I’ll put it in bold:

100 g of flour + 1 egg

While we were making the pasta in Italy, I didn’t need any water to pull my mix into a dough. Phillip ended up needing a little. Here in California, I’ve always needed a little water.

Here are the steps if you don’t have a pasta roller/maker:

• Mix 100 g of “00” flour with 1 medium to large egg.
• If the dough looks dry after mixing, add a tablespoon of cold water at a time until it smooths out. Dry dough with look crumbly, jagged, or shaggy. Smooth dough will look like a ball, but not stick to your hands too much.
• Dust some flour on a clean surface and knead until the ball is smooth and well mixed, but not too long!
• Wrap the ball with plastic wrap or a clean cloth and put in the refrigerator for about 20-30 mins.
• In the meantime, prep your sauce, put water on to boil, and clean up the inevitable snow storm of flour (or am I the only one?)
• Once the ball of dough has chilled and rested, dust flour on a surface and use a rolling pin to roll it into a very thin sheet. I tend to flip the dough a couple times during this process to keep it from sticking, or dusting with flour. Roll it slightly thinner than you think the pasta should be, feel free to cut the sheet to make it easier to manage. It should be rolled as thin as you possibly can get it without it sticking to the surface or tearing if you pick it up.
• Once the pasta is thin enough, roll it like a yoga mat and be very careful to not pinch the edges. The length of the dough is how long your noodles will be. Cut the pasta into strips as wide as you want – the thinner you get it, the closer to fettuccine it’ll be, wider the more like tagliatelle.
• Carefully unroll each noodle, dusting with flour if necessary as you mound the noodles up. Shake off excess flour.
• If you pasta water is boiling, make sure you’ve salted it well and drop your noodles in carefully, stirring to make sure they don’t stick together.
• Homemade pasta only needs a few minutes to cook, varying on thickness. The pasta will start to float, so you may need to push it back down gently or stir to make sure all the noodles cook evenly. Spaghetti might cook in three minutes, and tagliatelle in about 5.
• If you’re not sure if the pasta is done, just try a noodle! Fish one out, blow on it profusely, and try it. If it’s not done, spit it out in the trash.
• One the noodles are done, drain the water. Some sauce recipes might call for a reserve of the pasta water to loosen up the sauce, so keep that in mind!