How to Make Homemade Pasta – an easy, step-by-step tutorial on how to make the best pasta of your life! Serve with homemade alfredo sauce for the perfect meal or this easy beef stroganoff!

You haven’t really had pasta until you have made it yourself.  From scratch.  It is insane.  It is insane how doughy the noodles are.  How light you can make them.  It is insane how much better they taste than some of that stuff you can buy at the store.  It is what pasta should taste like.  A small slice of heaven.  Luxurious, indulgent and yet so simple and easy.  Just flour and eggs, you guys.  Flour and eggs.

I won’t preach too much because it wasn’t all that long ago that I had never made homemade pasta myself.  The stuff from the box was sufficient and, hey, I didn’t really know any better.  Blissfully ignorant, I suppose.  Then, my husband got me a couple pasta attachments for Christmas this year.  I had been pining over them for a couple years. But when I got them, I didn’t even use them right away – they just sat nicely in their boxes for a good month and a half.  I think making homemade pasta sounded intimidating.  Complicated.  An ordeal.

It’s not.

It’s really quite simple and, especially once you do it once or twice, it is super easy and quick.

So we had a pasta night.  I made homemade fettuccine with my Mom and homemade Alfredo sauce (I will post the recipe as soon as possible!).  It was all so simple.  And amazing.

Don’t be intimidated.  Just try it.

You don’t necessarily need a fancy Kitchen Aid mixer, either.  (But damn does it make it quick and easy).  You can get hand crank pasta rollers as well.  Hell, you could even go crazy and roll out the dough with a rolling pin and cut the dough into strips with a knife.  I bet those noodles will still taste better than the store-bought ones.

Bottom line –  try something new.  Try making homemade pasta – the stuff you have eaten your whole life.  Do you even know what good pasta tastes like?  One way to find out…

What you need/Ingredients:

1. 4 large eggs (as fresh as possible)
2. 2 cups all-purpose flour

Mix 2 cups of all-purpose flour with 3 of your large eggs.

Mix away until it forms a dough.

If your dough is too crumbly (like mine always seems to be with 3 eggs), add either some additional egg whites or some water, about 1 Teaspoon at a time.  If it is dry, add additional flour one Teaspoon at a time.

Above: too crumbly

Below: perfect

Remove from your mixing bowl and knead the dough until it becomes smooth and elastic.

Then wrap it in plastic wrap and let it rest for no less than 15-20 minutes, but it could stand to sit there for even longer (2-3 hours) if you have the time.

Then take dough and cut a inch thick slice off.

Take your pasta attachment or crank and just run your disk of dough through once on the thickest/widest setting.

Then fold both sides in to the middle.

Run through your past attachment again, feeding the open side through first.

Repeat.

Then take the dough and start feeding it through the roller and every time make the setting a little thinner.  Eventually you will start to be able to see the outline of your hand/fingers – that is good.  Once you get down to the last couple settings, you can decide how thin or thick you want your pasta.

Once you have reached your desired thickness, place flat pasta sheet in between two damp, clean kitchen towels so they don’t dry out.

Repeat the process until you are done with the dough.  Make sure you are keep the excess dough wrapped in the plastic wrap while you are rolling out the rest so it doesn’t dry out.

Once you are done rolling out the sheets, you can then take out your pasta cutter or fettuccine cutter and feed the sheets through to get your cut pasta.

Hang your pasta or curl into bunches (as shown).  You can either cook it right away (fresh pasta only needs to cook about 1-3 minutes, depending upon thickness – or you can dry it and save it for later.  Refrigerate for up to 2 days or freeze for about 2 months or so.

Just imagine what homemade roasted marinara sauce or chunky roasted tomato sauce would taste like with fresh, homemade noodles!  I can vouch – it tastes frickin amazing.

Alright, that’s it for me!   I would love to hear if you make some fresh pasta for the first time – or if you are a champ already, what your favorite tips and tricks are!

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Love,

E