Homemade Pasta
.jpg)
This recipe makes enough dough for two. If there are four, or if you want leftovers, you probably need two batches. Make them seperately as a bread machine is not a stand mixer. So get the bread maker out and add
- 1/3 cup semolina
- 1/4 cup double-O
Note that the flour goes in before the egg, otherwise the egg makes too much goo under the paddle. Start the bread machine up on dough cycle. After a minute or so it will need help. Unplug the machine and, using a wooden spoon, clean all the goop you can off the paddle and smunch it into whatever looks to be the biggest dough ball. Also scrape down the sides to get all the loose flour you can available to the paddle. Plug the machine back in and it should start up where it left off.
Your dough at this point will be several little balls or clumps and a bunch of loose flour. Add 1/2 tsp water which should make everything stick enough that the paddle can grab it and then one coherent ball should form.
Let the machine whack away at the dough ball until the add ingredients alarm goes off at approximately the fifteen minute mark. Then unplug the machine, take out your dough ball, cover with plastic wrap and set it somewhere to rest while you set up the pasta machine. Don't forget to soak your bread maker basket. Pasta dough becomes cement if you leave it.
Once the pasta machine is ready, roll your dough ball through a couple of times, folding it in half with each pass, at the 0 setting until it becomes kind of rectangular. Make any stickiness go away by sprinkling some flour on it each time you roll it out, but it should never get so dry as to be hard to roll.
When the dough is ready to proceed, progress through the roller thicknesses until you reach 8 (0.6mm) for fettuccini, lasagna or spaghetti, 9 (0.5 mm) for angel hair. Note these settings are one click thinner than recommended, so if you are serving pasta snobs be advised.
Cut the pasta into fettuccini or angel hair if that's what you want and hang it on a wooden spoon to dry. If it's lasagna you're making, then don't cut the noodles longwise, instead cut them across to be a bit smaller than your lasagna pan. Then blanch them for two minutes and put on a rack to dry flat. They will expand a certain amount in the blanching process.
To cook fettuccini, boil in salted water for three minutes. Angel hair is only one minute. Lasagna is cooked a little after blanching and gets cooked the rest of the way in the oven.
Fettuccini and angel hair pasta freeze great once dry. If you're making a lasagna then once you have it assembled including the noodles, but before you bake it, it will also freeze quite nicely and can even be cooked from frozen by simply giving it an extra half hour with foil on top.
Now to clean the pasta machine. There's only one way to clean a pasta machine : don't. You clean a pasta machine by rolling a batch of dough through it. You just did that. So it's clean. Brush off anything loose and turn your attention to the bread maker basket which will take some work.