How to make simple homemade pasta

Homemade pasta is seriously easy. You can find so many fancy, complicated recipes & methods online, but I’m sure most of them make the old Italian grannies spit their bolognese out. They really are quite unnecessary for beginner pasta makers!

Homemade pasta is so quick and easy to make. My usual process is to put my water on to boil, make pasta while waiting for water to boil, toss straight into the boiling water.

Yes, looking online you will find some long and impressive sounding methods and recipes. You will read that you NEED to use special flour, or that you NEED to let your dough rest for at least an hour, but listen. You don’t. If you are serving your pasta to Gordon Ramsay’s Italian friend, then yeah, maybe. But I’m guessing you’re not. And even this super simple, most basic of recipes is going to beat store bought, dried pasta – hands down!

How to overcomplicate homemade pasta:

• Add extra egg yolks (apparently makes pasta extra silky, or extra yellow, depends who you ask).
• Add anything other than flour and eggs (later when you get more adventurous you can try sourdough pasta though!)
• Get hung up on resting times (I feel like this is so unimportant I wonder if its made up??)
• Use fancy flour (again with the silky – if no one told me I would never have noticed)
• Care what type of flour you are using! (See above point!)

How to actually make simple homemade pasta:

• Mix some flour and egg.
• Let sit if you have time.
• Run it through the pasta maker.
• Cook
• Eat!

Here are some more specific instructions:

You will need:
1 egg
1 Cup of LITERALLY ANY type of flour

Now just:
Mix them together until the egg is incorporated into some of the flour.

Ok, so there is a technique to do this easily. But it’s super simple!

I put my flour into a shallow bowl and make a hole in the centre.
Crack your egg into the hollow.

Gently scramble the egg, then begin making gradually larger circles incorporating small amounts of the flour.

You won’t need all of the flour in your bowl, so this is a good technique to incorporate what you need, and leave the rest of the flour relatively dry. How much of the flour you use will depend on the size of your egg, and your flour. Leave the excess flour in the bowl (you will use this later).

Once you have a good little dough ball, you can let sit for a bit if you have time. Honestly, if you don’t have time, it won’t matter!!

Let’s make pasta!

You will need to have your pasta maker on the largest setting. On most this means 1, and as the numbers get higher the setting gets thinner.

Cut or pull a small chunk off your dough ball. This recipe will make a dough ball that can be cut into 4 or 5 pieces.

Run that chunk through. It’s good to fold over and run back through, repeating until you have a very smooth squarish shape. The more time you spend here, the easier it will be once the settings get thinner.

Do this for each of your chunks, flouring afterwards and setting aside.

Once all your chunks are lovely, smooth, floured squares, change your pasta maker setting to about half. On mine, I use 4.

Run your pasta squares through, folding only if something goes wrong. This could be if you accidentally go off centre of if something creates a hole. Flour each afterwards.

Have you noticed yet that flouring is your friend? If you can spread your flour on a large flat oven tray, and lay your pasta sheets out on that each time, that works perfectly.

Run your sheets through one more time on whichever setting you want your final pasta thickness to be. I use 7 (my thinnest is 8).

Now you have lasagne sheets!

If you want to, you can run these through your spaghetti or any other cutter you have. If you don’t have any cutters you can make ravioli, or cut them manually with a knife – this is a great way to make pappardelle, and was my standard before I bought the extra cutters for my pasta machine.

Just be sure to flour really well before cutting, you don’t want the pasta to stick to itself during the process.

It is quite important to keep your pasta floured once it is cut. I place my pasta into a bowl and toss really well in quite a bit of flour. This is especially important if you are letting the pasta sit for any amount of time after cutting. If you can, it’s great to spread it out over your floured oven tray or board.

This same recipe and method can be used to make pasta that you intend to dry for later use. I usually use a pasta drying rack to hang mine, but you could also make loose bundles and dry by airing out over a few days.

Your pasta will keep indefinitely once completely dry.

Give it a go! Making your own homemade pasta is so so easy. It feels and tastes so luxurious, but in reality is so easy to make yourself, cheaply and simply, and will make a huge difference to your pasta dishes.

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