Homemade Pasta

I love pasta! I could probably eat it everyday. A few months back, we started making our own from scratch and rolling it out by hand. It's laborious, but well worth the effort. Once we decided that this pasta making wouldn't be just an occasional treat, we bought the attachment pieces to the mixer we have to speed up the process a bit.

Here's some pictures of how it's done with the machine, and the family's favorite noodle recipe. Enjoy!

The machine, covered in flour. The recipe we use is stickier than normal, so I have to coat the dough in flour each time I put it in the machine so pieces won't get stuck.

This is the size of the dough ball before it gets flattened out. It's surprising to me still, just how many noodles you get from such a small ball of dough.

Cutting the pasta, after it's been flattened. The flattening process activates the wheat gluten in the flour, which is what creates the smooth texture of the noodle.

Our pasta hanging to dry. I did another batch with basil from our garden in it. I want to use it for our next pasta salad - yum! Here's our recipe, adapted from one I found at allrecipes.com

Noodles:

2.5 Cups flour (we use whole wheat)
1 pinch salt
2 eggs beaten
1/2 Cup milk
1 tbsp melted butter

Stir flour and salt together. Add the liquid ingredients and mix well, then knead dough for 5-10 minutes if not using a pasta roller. Let the dough sit for 10 minutes before rolling out. Cut noodles to desired width and that's it!

Because of the egg and milk in the recipe, you can't dry these out for storage. You can freeze them though. Frozen noodles take about 7-10 minutes to cook in boiling water, and fresh noodles take about 5 minutes to cook in boiling water.