Easy Pasta Recipes! Are you a real foodie? Are you fond of spending
hours in your kitchen cooking, experimenting and are you incredibly curious
about food in general? Do you possess a healthy portion of patience?
Then you might like to develop a new passion: making your own fresh
pasta at home to prepare the easy pasta recipes below! The basic ingredients you need are
drop dead simple but dirt cheap. One thing you have to do is use good
quality products. Pasta is an easy dish, however in the end it all comes
down to taste and texture.
Here we go! This is all you need for your own homemade fresh pasta: flour, eggs and olive oil. And the obvious sprinkle of salt of course...
Flour
I prefer semola di grano duro from the famous brand De Cecco. It's a
yellowish, coarse and crumbly type of flour. Nothing like the snow-white
powdered plain kitchen flour. It takes a while to knead it into a
proper dough but the result on the plate is rewarding. The dough might
look coarse too but after resting for awhile it becomes a shiny and
homogeneous mix. I’ve used plain flour before but it was slightly
heavier on the stomach. Count 100 g flour (3,5 oz) per person. Extra
flour will eventually be added while rolling and dusting the pasta
sheets.
Eggs
Use medium chicken eggs, each of them an average 50 to 60 g (1,7 to 2
oz). It’s up to you to decide what you want to add. Some people only add
the yolks. This gives the pasta a great yellow color. Count 2 yolks to
replace 1 whole egg. Scrambling the eggs or yolks before adding them to
the flour might help.
Olive Oil
The average kitchen olive oil is just fine. Its taste won’t dominate the
pasta that much. Taste is influenced more by the type of flour and
quality of the eggs. The oil serves as a healthy glue to keep the dough
together.
I hope you can already see that fresh pasta is damn frugal! A bag of
De Cecco flour costs about €2 ($3) for 1 kg (2,2 lb). Add eggs and a
drizzle of olive oil. This brings us to the astonishing price of €0,50
($0,65) per person!!
Great! So now we know what we need to make
a fresh pasta dough. We only have to make thin sheets out of it now. Of
course that won’t work by only staring at it. A pasta machine might help! Any
pasta machine will do as long as you can attach it to your kitchen
worktop. It's utterly useless if it only sits on your kitchen counter and moves around like crazy. You need
to stabilize the machine so you can apply some force to it while rolling out your
dough. Don't go too crazy on the price. An expensive machine is not
necessarily a better one. Don’t buy a pricy electric one unless you consider
yourself a pasta pro already. I paid less than 30 bucks for mine and the
result is just perfect. Start simple with a machine that contains
preferably a spaghetti and tagliatelle cutting roll. Later if you’re
getting very experienced at it you can invest some more. Most cutting
rolls can be purchased separately and are easily to attach on any machine. Clean the machine with a dry towel. Never rinse it with water! The
metal rolls might get rusty resulting in an unappetizing extra color and
taste. Store it (in its original box) in a dry cupboard.
Attention:
in these easy pasta recipes I mainly list fresh pasta as one of the
ingredients. Of course you’re free to prepare whatever you want:
homemade fresh pasta, store-bought fresh pasta or even dry pasta from a
box depending on the amount of time you have. Find more about pasta and recipe in this book I cherish:
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