Homemade Pasta Recipe

Learning to make pasta was never on my radar. I never doubted that homemade noodles were FAR superior to any Great Value boxed pasta but I just never had the desire to learn to make pasta. That was until my mom gifted me a pasta maker for Christmas. If I’m being perfectly honest, it took me about 6 months to unbox it.

As someone who doesn’t like to keep things that I don’t use, I decided that it was either time to try making my own pasta and learning how to use the machine or pass it on to someone who would love it. I fell in love with the concept of making my own pasta and own pasta sauce. I knew my pasta loving family would be thrilled!

The pasta maker came with a recipe for noodles but after quite a few experiments with the recipe from the pasta maker, I realized that the recipe given just wasn’t right. I tried more flour, more egg, less flour, less egg until I settled on this recipe. Since then, my noodles have been almost perfect every time.

Gather your ingredients. You will need eggs, all-purpose flour, a very fine extra virgin olive oil and salt. I also like to keep a small bowl of water on hand for when I’m kneading the dough.

There are two methods to go about creating pasta dough. The first is the traditional way of creating an egg well in the middle of your flour and slowly mixing it all by hand. This is a great way to go if you don’t have a stand mixer or you have the time to take longer on making the perfect pasta.

I often go the other route by adding all my ingredients into a stand mixer and waiting until they are mostly combined. If I’m working in the kitchen, I am often multi-tasking and tackling multiple food preparations at once. Using my stand mixer allows me to use my time more effectively.

Both methods will produce the same end result.

Once all of your ingredients are combined into a rough dough, it may look and feel a bit crumby still but that okay, you will start the kneading process. Kneading the dough can be a bit time consuming. This is where I use my dip bowl of water to aid the process on. I simply dip my fingers in the water and go back to kneading the dough. I find that doing this a few times helps to bring the dough together quicker.

Pasta dough is much firmer than a typical bread dough. You’ll have to put a bit more elbow grease into it. Once you have a completely smooth ball of dough, you will be done with this process.

Place your dough into a bowl and cover. Let it stand for up to 30 minutes.

Now it is time to create your shape of noodles. This will just be a quick walkthrough of how I make my noodles. For the best reults, follow the instructions of your specific pasta maker!

For my manual pasta maker, I start by rolling my dough out into sheets. The dial on the side has the numbers from 1-9, the bigger the number, the thicker the noodles. I start off at 9 and work my way down to the number 2. I then take the long sheet and run in through the pasta cutter. This attachment is what shapes the noodles.

I carefully guide my pasta through and once it is cut, I hang each noodle on a drying rack to dry.

To store, you can either wait until the pasta is fully dry before transferring it into a air tight storage container. You can also freeze your noodles right as they come out of the pasta maker. Dried pasta will keep for up to 6 months and frozen pasta can be stored in the freezer for up to a year!

Homemade pasta is a time consuming but very rewarding process. Have you tried it?

Try serving with my homemade dairy-free pesto! You can find the recipe here.