Pasta: Fresh and Cheap

Making pasta at home is cost effective and extremely awesome.  The taste of homemade pasta is so much better than the dried pasta at the supermarket, but we rarely make it.  I was reminded of this last Friday when we made a pasta dish for a friend who came over for dinner.   The proportions to make pasta dough are pretty simple: 3/4 cup flour to 1 egg (I tripled this to have leftovers, but that ratio can serve 2 people easily).  I used a food processor since I tripled the recipe, but here’s an easy way to use your hands.

Homemade Pasta

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour

To Do:

1. Pile the flour on a clean counter and make a small depression in the middle (think of a making a volcano for science class).
2. Crack the egg into the middle of the dough and start mixing the dough with your hands – move the flour from the outside into the middle until it all becomes incorporated and you can start kneading.
3. Knead the dough until it becomes smooth and shiny.
4. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap for about 15 minutes.
5. If you have a pasta maker, use it to flatten and cut the pasta.
6. If you don’t, take a piece of the dough (put the rest back in the plastic wrap), and roll it out as thinly as you possibly can.  Cut into desired shapes.  I dried mine out a bit before cooking so the pasta strands wouldn’t stick together (see photo above).  You can just lay out the pasta on top of a clean cloth if you want to dry it out.   Repeat with remaining dough.
7. Cook pasta in plenty of salted, boiled water with a drop of olive oil.  Since its pretty fresh, it won’t take long, so make sure you taste a strand after a 4-5 minutes.
8. Serve with whatever your heart desires.

We served ours with a mushroom, shallot and red wine sauce and some of those greens I got in Chinatown the other day.  Yum!

---