Saturday, February 1, 2014

Pasta Making

So I have a pasta machine I've only used once. My friend Jeanne and I planned a day where we just pulled out some pasta recipes and played. We had a few recipes. We started with a basic flour, egg, water combo. 1cup flour, 1 egg, 1 Tbsp. of water. We ended up adding ?4 Tbsp. water. We thought this was the hardest. Kneading, even with a Kitchen Aid mixer/ dough hook was tough.
 Then we tried Semolina flour, egg, oil and water. Then flour, sour cream, chive and water. Finally we did Italian seasoning, 1/4 cup sour cream and 1cup flour. The sour cream was by far the easiest to work with.
We were confused what the order was on the pasta machine for the dials from thick to thin. Level 1 is where you should start and we felt level 6 was way too thin. We liked levels 4 or 5 for thickness.
Fettuccine was easiest to make, so we started there.
The drying rack came in much handier than I anticipated.
You can see the sour cream and chive on the right, the semolina in the middle and the flour on the top left row.
It cooked up in 5-7 minutes. Some of the chives came out (I used frozen, not dried. next time- dried herbs!).

We also tried some spaghetti. It was very thin, but very good. The most important thing to remember is NOT to was the pasta machine, not even a damp cloth. It was rust and ruin. Just let it dry and brush/shake.