Fresh pasta

I know what you’re thinking. WHY would you make your own pasta when shop-bought pasta tastes delicious and is no effort?

I hear you. I also think you’re missing the point about why you would want to make things like pasta and pastry at home. It’s only partially for the end result. Mostly for me, it’s for the enjoyment of the process. I agree that homemade pasta isn’t drastically different from buying it from the shop; certainly not enough to make the effort to make it all the time.

But if like me, you have a Sunday afternoon free and a hankering for pasta, you could do worse than putting on a podcast and getting out the pasta machine. Cooking is such a satisfying way to pass the time and at the end of it, you have delicious food.

I made a large batch and used half of it to make spinach and ricotta ravioli, which I served with a tomato sauce.

BBC Good Food

Servings 8

Ingredients

300 g ‘00’ pasta flour plus extra for dusting
2 eggs and 4 yolks lightly beaten
semolina flour for dusting

Instructions

Put the flour in a food processor with ¾ of your egg mixture and a pinch of salt. Blitz to large crumbs – they should come together to form a dough when squeezed (if it feels a little dry gradually add a bit more egg). Tip the dough onto a lightly floured surface, knead for 1 min or until nice and smooth – don’t worry if it’s quite firm as it will soften when it rests. Cover with cling film and leave to rest for 30 mins.
Cut away ¼ of the dough (keep the rest covered with cling film) and feed it through the widest setting on your pasta machine. (If you don’t have a machine, use a heavy rolling pin to roll the dough as thinly as possible.) Then fold into three, give the dough a quarter turn and feed through the pasta machine again. Repeat this process once more then continue to pass the dough through the machine, progressively narrowing the rollers, one notch at a time, until you have a smooth sheet of pasta. On the narrowest setting, feed the sheet through twice.
Cut as required to use for filled pastas like tortellini, or cut into lengths to make spaghetti, linguine, tagliatelle, or pappardelle. Then, dust in semolina flour and set aside, or hang until dry (an hour will be enough time.) Store in a sealed container in the fridge and use within a couple of days, or freeze for 1 month.