Homemade pasta is a quick and easy project, and delicious!
You can use any number of different flours to make pasta, but traditionally it's made with semolina flour (pictured here). You can make a pile on a cutting board, use a bowl, or add to a food processor if you want to combine steps 1-4 in a processor.
Make a divot in your flour so the eggs have somewhere to stay, then add your eggs. A good rule of thumb for making pasta is 1 egg to 100g of flour (or approximately 3 eggs per 2 cups of flour). Here we have 600g of flour so 6 eggs.
This step just makes the next step easier/more consistent.
Push flour from the sides of your eggs into your egg mixture, and slowly work together flour and eggs until you have a shaggy dough. You can do all the steps up to here in a food processor if you desire.
You can knead your dough by hand for that authentic Italian feel, or you can use the dough hook on the stand mixer. Here we've used a combination of both, the dough hook to get started and some hand kneading at the end to make sure the consistency is right. You are looking for the point where your shaggy dough becomes smooth and stretchy. Approximately 10 minutes?
Here you see the dough after kneeding.
Wrap your dough in plastic wrap and rest it in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.
It might not look like much now, but once you get your dough thin it'll stretch pretty long. Divide your dough into workable sections. Here we've quartered the dough with a knife.
Using the pasta roller attachments for the stand mixer, start to roll out your dough. You will start on setting 1 and slowly work your way up to the thinness you desire for your pasta. For our spaghetti here we have gone to the thinnest setting, 8.
Here you can see the settings for the pasta roller. To adjust the thinness, pull out the knob and twist it to the desired setting.
Your pasta might start oddly shaped, but you are looking to get as square as possible. To aid getting your pasta in a flat sheet, you can fold it over on itself into thirds and push it through on the same setting. You'll likely do this a number of times on setting 1, and a few times on higher settings.
Here you can see the pasta roller in operation.
Switch out the pasta roller attachment for the spaghetti attachment
Running your thin sheet through the spaghetti roller will turn it into strands.
I recommend having a container ready under the spaghetti slicer. Strands will want to escape onto the floor without something ready to catch your spaghetti.
Congrats! You have now made your own spaghetti from scratch!
When cooking your pasta, remember that fresh pasta cooks MUCH more quickly than dried pasta. You're looking to get al dente, and should only require a few minutes in boiling water.
