Thursday, October 2, 2014

Homemade Italian Pasta- Thoughts on Lesson 2

Lesson two of Craftsy's Homemade Italian Pasta class is all about rolling and cutting your pasta. There really is a method to it all. But first, I had to mix up some dough according to the directions in lesson one. All you need for dough is flour and room temperature eggs.

After making a "bowl" out of my flour and cracking my eggs inside the indentation, you just have to mix the two together.

It kind of looks like a weird birds nest.
So you mix this into a dough, let it rest (much as you have to let bread dough rest before you can form it into loaves).  Then you cut it the same amount of pieces as eggs used.  So mine was cut into three relatively equal sized pieces.  You flatten these out, and then comes the fun part- using the pasta machine! I got mine at a garage sale for $3, and it sounds a little rickety, but it did the job fine.

You're not supposed to stop in the middle of pressing your dough,
so pardon the poor photo quality.  I was trying to hurry.

It was interesting to learn that there's a whole method to how you roll your dough, and you slowly adjust the thickness down, going piece by piece, until you've gone through almost all the settings.

Finally, once all the dough is rolled, you cut your three pieces in half (no need for yard long noodles) and lay it on dishtowels to dry out a little, flipping it about half way through to dry both sides.
Noodles in a pre-noodle state.
Then, it was finally time to run the dough through the pasta machine and cut it!  You then fold it in little nests of sorts and set it aside to dry.

Nests of noodles.
I'm really enjoying pasta making.  There's something about cooking food from scratch that is so cathartic.  I love it!  It's the same way I felt about making bread.  I really like how it's so hand intensive.  You spend minutes rolling or kneading dough, and there's this whole process involved, doing things just so, to get a quality finished product.  It just feels so tranquil.

 Note: All links are affiliate links, but all thoughts are my own.  This post is not sponsored by Craftsy and is just my own thoughts on the class.

No comments:

Post a Comment