Making Pasta From Scratch

     Does your family enjoy a nice dish of pasta every week? If so then you're not much different than my family. Each and every week on Sunday my family has a great big feast consisting of a lovely pasta dish with a nice red sauce to go along with it. You can't have a red sauce without some meatballs to go with it. My mother's meatball recipe is fantastic and is fabulous with her red sauce. To go along with the pasta, sauce, and meatballs comes other sides such as a bread of some sort, usually garlic bread. Garlic bread is a family favorite at my household, as I would imagine it is in many households throughout the world. With every meal you must have some greens. By greens I mean vegetables. With every Sunday feast we have, comes a nice salad to go along with it. You can't just eat a big dish of pasta without having some vegetables to go with it.

     I look forward to Sunday's because I simply love a nice dish of pasta. I come from an Italian background and grew up eating pasta my whole life. It wasn't until about three months ago that I decided to try and make my own homemade pasta. What do I mean by that? Well making pasta is fun and all but it's pretty simple if you ask me. Boil some water, throw the noodles in and let them cook for a few minutes until the noodles are soft and ready to eat. Other than that you can heat some pre-bought sauce up in a sauce pan on low-medium for a bit to get it hot for the noodles. To me that's boring. What I decided I wanted to do was to make my own noodles, and sauce from scratch. To do this a few things were needed. The most important thing that was needed, which was the most unlikely thing for me to have, was a pasta machine. Pasta machines are used to flatten out your dough and also cut your dough into your desired noodle shape. Finding a pasta machine was my next problem, so I started with my family. Conveniently the first person I asked who happened to be my mother, had a pasta machine packed away in the basement. The best part about her pasta machine was the fact that she actually had a quality, well known pasta machine. My mother's machine was called the Atlas 150 Pasta Machine, which you can see in the image below.

     
Atlas is a well-known Italian company that creates pasta products. When it comes to a solid pasta machine, the atlas 150 is at the top of its game. So I decided to go ahead and make some homemade pasta on my own but had no idea what I was doing. Luckily my grandma was over and had been doing this for years. She told me when she use to make it back in the old country that they didn't even have these machines to help them. What they would do is simply take a dough roller and roll out the dough as thin as they could get it, and then they would cut it into their desired shapes. I said the heck with that! I'm going to use this machine because it looks a heck of a lot easier. After my grandma walked me through making the dough, which was an overall pretty easy task, I then went on and Googled how to make homemade pasta with a pasta machine. After about an hour of screwing around with the machine and some dough I quickly made to practice with, I then went on to begin my first homemade pasta noodle operation.

To start I made my dough again. This time around I made a lot more, and it was easier to work with then the first time around. I used about 3 eggs, 2 tsp. of olive oil, and 2 cups of flour. I put all my ingredients into a mixing bowl and mixed them together until my dough was just the right texture. My grandma told me that you're looking for the dough to hold together, but not to work the dough too much because it will gain moisture in the next step.

   After creating the dough, I then wrapped it in saran wrap, and put it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. Once the 30 minutes was up I grabbed my dough and realized it had indeed gained moisture like my grandma had said. Now its time to flatten our dough out. I grabbed a good size piece of dough about the size of an apple to work with. I then flatted it out as good as I could so it could fit into the pasta machine. Remember to have your pasta machine set to the lowest setting when starting off. The lowest setting is usually the widest setting on the machine. You want to start feeding your dough through the widest setting, then work your way down to the thinnest gradually. I was taught to start with the first setting, and do every other setting until I'm done, repeating each setting twice. 

So to get a better idea of what I'm saying, the Atlas 150 Pasta Machines have 6 settings. I would start by feeding my dough through the first setting twice, then move on to the 3rd setting, and feed the dough through this setting twice, then I would feed my dough through the 5th setting twice, and since there's only 6 settings, I would finish off by feeding my dough through the 6th setting twice.

So the break down would be:

1st setting twice. 3rd setting twice. 5th setting twice. 6th setting twice.

You want to make sure that the dough is being fed through the machine evenly, a detailed picture is shown to the left. The machine offers 5 inches of space to run your dough through, and you want to use every inch you've got. 

Once all your dough is rolled out and flattened, you then want to move on to your pasta attachment. Once your attachment is chosen, hook it up to the end of the pasta machine, it should slide on easily. After switching the crank handle from the machine over to the attachment, take one of your flattened pieces of dough and feed it through the attachment. As you can see to the left, you want to have a set of hands to receive the pasta so it doesn't clump up and get messy.

Repeat this step for all your flattened dough, and set all your pasta aside to dry. If you want to cook your pasta fresh, simply boil the noodles for 3-4 minutes. Remember cooking time for fresh noodles is significantly less. 

I hope everyone liked my walk through of how to make pasta from scratch. If you have any questions please visit my website and contact me. www.letseatpasta.com.