Making pasta at home. How to cook pasta, noodles and macaroni at home

These are semi-finished products made from dough mixed with water. After molding, they are thoroughly dried and subsequently used as food in boiled form. In Rus', every housewife knew how to cook homemade pasta. For Italians, for example, the word “dough” is translated as “pasta”. Therefore, this is what such products are called in this country. Pasta has a lot of spaghetti, fettuccine, noodles and others. Local housewives also like to cook them with their own hands. Moreover, this can be done in different ways.

Pasta dough

To make homemade pasta tasty and appetizing, you need to know how to properly prepare the dough for it. To prepare it, as a rule, two main components are required: wheat flour and egg yolks. But in this composition it is difficult to mix these products. To obtain a more homogeneous mass, you can add a little water to them. According to the classic Italian recipe for preparing pasta dough, you need to use the following ratio of components:

for 400 grams of flour, the yolks of three eggs, a little salt and 35 grams of water.

You need to prepare the dough gradually:

First, you need to beat the yolks a little. To do this, you can use a whisk or a regular fork.
Sift the flour through a sieve and pour it onto the table in the form of a slide.
Make a well in the very center and pour the prepared yolks into it.
Add salt, add water and mix well. The mass should be smooth and quite elastic.
Wrap the semi-finished product in cling film and let it lie for at least half an hour.

After this, you can proceed to the next stage - molding:

The ripened dough must be rolled out into a thin layer, and then sprinkled with flour and rolled into a roll.
Cut into pieces with a sharp knife. After that, each of them must be expanded. You will get even long strips.
Dry them overnight, spreading them out on a baking sheet.

This homemade pasta can be stored for a month in an airtight container.

Secrets of quality

To make the right paste, you need to follow the advice of experienced professionals. Any experienced cook knows that homemade pasta will turn out delicious if the housewife follows the following rules:

It is better to use durum flour and knead it with water. This dough cooks much faster.
Eggs should only be taken if you don’t have the necessary flour at home. Stores usually sell soft varieties. In addition, a certain proportion must be observed: one egg is required per 100 grams of flour.
Particular attention should be paid to the preparation of the starting components. It is advisable to sift the flour before use to further enrich it with oxygen. Then the dough will definitely be elastic and homogeneous.
The duration of the kneading is usually no more than 20 minutes. Longer processing may lead to the destruction of gluten.
The finished dough must be ripe. To do this, it must be kept for 30 minutes in a cool place.
It is better to roll out the dough in small pieces on a table sprinkled with flour. The remains must be covered with a towel to prevent them from airing.
Slicing can be done with a sharp knife or special equipment can be used for this.

Only taking into account all the rules listed above can you guarantee that the finished products will actually be of the desired quality.

Homemade spaghetti

In Italy they love to cook spaghetti. This one is especially popular in this sunny country. They are eaten almost every day, seasoned with various sauces. To prepare such homemade pasta, an unusual recipe is often used. To work, you need to take 400 grams of wheat flour, 10 grams of salt, 4 raw eggs and 17-34 grams of olive oil.

Sift the flour and carefully pour it in a heap directly onto the table.
Beat the eggs well. To make the process more efficient, you can add salt to them.
Make a small hole in the flour with your hand and pour in the prepared eggs along with the butter.
Knead the dough thoroughly.
Place it in a cool place for half an hour for better ripening. The semi-finished product must first be wrapped in film or covered with a towel.
Divide the dough into pieces, and then roll each of them out thinly.
Prepare spaghetti using a special cutting machine.

Finished products can be cooked immediately. For long-term storage they must be well dried. To do this, the workpieces must be hung on special devices. If you don’t have them, you can use regular clothes hangers. The result is simply amazing homemade pasta. The recipe is interesting because oil is used instead of water. This gives the products better plasticity and prevents them from sticking together during cooking.

Molding Rules

Residents of many countries love to cook pasta. The recipe is not difficult to repeat at home. As a rule, it is extremely simple and requires only certain knowledge, as well as the availability of the necessary equipment. It is mainly required for molding products. As you know, this process can be carried out in two ways:

Stamping. Using various molds, shaped products are obtained from a sheet of dough. This also includes the production of noodles, when the dough is cut into individual thin strips.
Pressing. For this, there are special screw presses, the design of which usually ends in a matrix with holes. The shape of the finished product will ultimately depend on the configuration of their cross-section. If the holes are round and solid, then the product is thread-like, and when they are slit-like, the product is ribbon or figured. If there are special inserts in the matrix, tubular pasta can be obtained. The recipe at home will depend on what equipment the housewife chooses.

True, not everyone has cutting machines or special presses in their kitchen. Then, for example, to prepare spaghetti, you can use a regular meat grinder.

Homemade pasta dish

To prepare an original and tasty dinner, you can use regular homemade pasta. The recipe with photos will clearly demonstrate how to do this best. Here, every housewife can show imagination and use non-standard techniques. Take, for example, pasta in cheese sauce. In this case, you will need the following ingredients:

For the dough - 300 grams of flour, 2 eggs, salt, 50 grams of milk and the same amount of butter.
For the sauce - 100 grams of sour cream and cheese, an onion and 30 grams of tomato paste.

The preparation of the dish must be carried out step by step:

First you need to knead the dough.
Then it needs to be rolled out into the thinnest possible layer. This is best done on a wooden surface to preserve the unique qualities of the product.
Cut the layer into strips no more than 10 centimeters wide, and then stack them one on top of the other, sprinkling with flour. The workpieces should not stick together.
Crumble them into thin noodles and then dredge them well in flour.
To prepare the sauce, first chop and fry the onion.
Add sour cream and grated cheese to it. A little later, add tomato paste.
Boil the noodles separately.
Combine pasta with sauce and mix everything well.

The result is a fragrant and very tasty dish that will certainly bring great pleasure to everyone.

Pasta casserole

For Italians, pasta is dough products in the form of hollow tubes of different diameters and lengths. You can make them in advance, and then store the finished products for a month in paper bags so that you can use them for their intended purpose at any time. In Italy they love to prepare casseroles, the main component of which is pasta. A homemade recipe with a photo will suggest a simple but quite interesting option. First you need to select the necessary products: 500 grams of ready-made pasta, a glass of sour cream, 20 grams of salt, 3 eggs, 50 grams of vegetable oil, 150 grams of hard cheese, breadcrumbs and a little butter.

Cooking method:

Cook the pasta in salted water for 5-6 minutes after boiling over low heat. After this, they must be thrown into a colander and allowed to drain completely.
At this time, grind the yolks separately with salt.
Add sour cream, stir, and a little later add grated cheese.
Combine the resulting mixture with boiled pasta.
Separately, beat the whites into a thick foam.
Add it to the pasta and mix the ingredients very carefully.
Grease the mold with butter, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and place the prepared mixture into it.
Bake for 20 minutes in an oven preheated to 190 degrees.

It is better to serve this casserole hot, greasing its surface with butter.

Colored pasta

Even children know that brightly colored dishes stimulate appetite more. That is why every housewife should pay attention to the appearance of the finished product. What about dough products? As a rule, they should have a yellowish tint. It is mainly due to the presence of eggs. But this is not the only option. An experienced housewife knows how to make homemade pasta so that just by looking at it you will immediately want to eat it. To give dried semi-finished products different shades, you can use natural food colors in the form of vegetable additives (spinach, carrot, beet or tomato juice). They must be added to the dough partially instead of water. In this way you can prepare multi-colored pasta, which will look very impressive in a plate. To work, you will need 50 milliliters of green basil, carrot and fresh tomato juice, 8 eggs, 1.2 kilograms of flour and 50 milliliters of water.

Process technology:

Divide the flour into 4 parts and pour them into piles on the table.
Add water to one of them, and juices to the others.
Add beaten eggs to each portion and knead the dough.
Cut the noodles in any convenient way. If you have a special machine for this, the process is significantly simplified.
Roll the finished semi-finished products into rings or nests and leave them to dry in a well-ventilated area.

After this, the finished products will only need to be boiled. They will make an original and very beautiful side dish.

At first glance, cooking pasta at home is a difficult task. Despite the fact that this requires a lot of effort and time, you will be generously rewarded for your efforts. They are not a replacement for regular factory-produced pasta that can be found on the shelves of any supermarket. Having a unique texture combined with certain types of sauces, they will invariably please the true pasta connoisseur. Homemade pasta literally melts in your mouth, especially if you serve it with a sauce made from butter or cream. Those who limit themselves to store-bought products are actually depriving themselves of the pleasure of tasting the true taste of pasta.

To prepare them, you only need two ingredients: flour and eggs. Some also add salt and/or olive oil, but this is not necessary and, according to some experts, is at odds with the traditional recipe. After kneading, the dough can be subjected to the following processing: either rolled out manually using a regular roller; or passing through rollers in a special manual pasta cutting machine. Now we will take a closer look at the process of preparing fresh pasta using the second method.

Flour and eggs: Place flour in a large bowl and make a small well in the center. Break two eggs into the center, beat them lightly, gradually grabbing flour from the edges, until smooth. Mix the dough thoroughly by hand.

Knead the dough: transfer the dough to a table sprinkled with flour in advance and knead as follows: with the back of your hand, roll out the dough in one motion away from you and fold it back towards you; We do the same with the second half, previously untouched: roll it out, roll it up. Continue for 8-10 minutes until the dough thickens and becomes smooth.

Roll out the dough: following the instructions, place the pasta machine on the table and place the rollers in the widest compartment. Next, divide the dough into four parts, take one and roll it out to a thickness of 1-1.5 cm, pass it through the rollers, while simultaneously turning the handle. Fold the dough three times and pass it through the rollers again, repeat this procedure two more times. We turn the disk to the next mark, thereby narrowing the space between the rollers and pass the dough again. We continue the same thing, each time reducing the distance between the rollers until the arrow on the disk reaches the last mark. Set aside the rolled out dough and do the same with the remaining parts.

Cutting the dough: Most pasta machines are equipped with several types of blades for making noodles, fettuccine and tonnarelli pasta. To make fettuccine pasta at home, pass the dough through wide blades. Distribute the resulting strips on a towel so that they do not touch. For tonnarelli we use narrow blades. It is also possible to prepare pappardelle pasta by hand: cut the prepared parts of the dough in half; then we machine cut it into 2.5 cm thick using a special wheel.

Valentina Bondar

And if now we mostly buy noodles in the store, then quite recently neither Russian nor Italian housewives had much choice, and they constantly made pasta at home. There is nothing complicated about this (especially if you get a pasta machine), but you will know exactly what products your pasta is made from. Today you will find a long read - first the recipe itself, and then a video and a story about various methods of preparing pasta.

How to cook pasta, noodles and macaroni at home

In Italy, typo 00 flour from durum wheat is used to make pasta, and if you are going to cook Italian dishes from your pasta, look for it in supermarkets: this is a particularly finely ground flour, and the pasta from it turns out to be denser and less boiled. However, if you can’t find such flour, take regular high-grade wheat flour; with it, the pasta will not be the same as that of Italian grandmothers, but also not bad.

Sift 200 grams of flour into a bowl, break two large chicken eggs into it, add a pinch of salt and knead the dough. It should be stiff but elastic without sticking to your hands, so you may need to add a little flour or water when you cook the pasta. This is impossible to predict - it all depends on the quality of flour, the weight of the eggs, air humidity and other factors, but over time you will learn to feel the correct consistency of the dough. After kneading the dough vigorously, roll it into a tight ball, cover and let rest for half an hour or longer.

Roll out the dough ball into a sausage and cut it into several smaller balls. Roll each ball into a thin rectangle, generously sprinkling flour on both the surface of the table and the dough itself on the top side - so that it dries faster and does not stick to the table and rolling pin. Having rolled out all the dough, arm yourself with a sharp knife and cut it into strips of the desired thickness (for spaghetti and noodles - very narrow, for tagliatelle - wider), rectangles for either beshbarmak, or any other shape that you like. The dough for all varieties is prepared in the same way: it is better to prepare them right away, but all other types of pasta should first be dried and then put in the refrigerator or frozen.

How to Cook Pasta Using a Pasta Machine

From the kitchen equipment for the method described above, you only need a bowl, a rolling pin and a knife, but besides them you will need remarkable strength - after all, kneading and then rolling out stiff dough is not as easy as it seems at first. In this sense, a pasta machine is a very useful tool - so useful that I highly recommend getting one for anyone who loves pasta, noodles, etc., and regularly prepares dishes with them. Such machines can be manual or electric, and in my case this role was played by attachments for a mixer, which I wrote about quite recently.

The set includes three attachments, one of which is used for rolling out the dough, and the other two are for cutting the rolled sheets for linguine and tagliatelle, respectively. This arrangement surprised me - for some reason I expected that it would be possible to change the cutting width, but here there are only two rigidly fixed options, to switch between which you also need to change the nozzles. At the same time, their width is only about 10 centimeters, that is, it is better not to initially overdo it with the amount of dough that you will roll out at a time.

However, in practice, making pasta using these attachments is quite convenient. Having installed the attachment for rolling out the dough - it is attached to a special connector in the head of the mixer - turn on the second speed (the instructions suggest setting the speed from 2 to 4, but the lower it is, the less risk of spoiling something), and set the thickness of the dough to 1 First, roll a small piece of the rested dough a couple of times until it forms a thick but flat sheet, then pass it through the roller several times, folding it in half after each roll to make the dough as elastic as possible. After this, reduce the thickness of the dough by 1 division, each time rolling the sheets through the attachment 2-3 times until you reach a dough thickness of 5. After this, you can install the selected attachment for cutting the dough and pass all the rolled sheets through it. To prevent the pasta from sticking, do not be greedy with flour for dusting; you should not wash the attachments themselves with water after finishing work - instead, let the dough dry and clean the attachments using the included brush.

In principle, your pasta is already ready: you can either dry it by hanging it on a special stand, the box with which I captured in a couple of photos above, and then either put it in the refrigerator or freeze until better times. In the latter case, it is better to roll the paste into nests for easy storage. By the way, KitchenAid, in addition to these attachments, also has a press that allows you to form tubes of various diameters, spirals and spaghetti, but for my needs these are enough for now.

For better clarity, I made a video recipe for homemade pasta, which, in my opinion, describes this process in quite detail and exhaustively:

(As you know, video recipes are not my thing, so I will be very glad if you leave your comments about what you liked and what you didn’t, so that I can make it even better next time).

If you are interested in the attachments that were used in the filming of this video, here they are - KitchenAid Pasta Roller Cutters.

Finally, I’ll give you some advice - more homemade pasta, noodles and pasta, good and different! They're worth it.

No store-bought pasta can compare with homemade noodles. Flour of the highest quality and careful rolling will allow you to make an indispensable addition to aromatic chicken broth.

Rolling out the dough is somewhat difficult due to its rigidity. Having sprinkled it generously, you can roll it up into several folds and continue working. The procedure is repeated, making folds in different places, until the layer becomes transparent. Before cutting, the workpieces can be slightly dried in the oven.

The finished vermicelli must be dried thoroughly, allowing it to sit for at least half an hour. Long-term storage implies fragility of the product.

Ingredients

1 egg
100 ml milk
2 pinches of salt
1-1.5 tbsp. wheat flour

Preparation

1. In Soviet times, pasta was created only from yolks, salt and flour, but such dough was so difficult to roll out that vermicelli became unfairly forgotten and gave way to quick porridges and vegetable side dishes. In order not to bother ourselves with a long roll out of non-plastic dough, we will simply add milk to it, thereby giving it both plasticity and taste! If you have a bread machine, knead the noodle dough in it, while simultaneously adding all the ingredients to the machine’s bowl.

2. If not, then pour wheat flour into a container, making a depression in it, and beat a chicken egg into it, pour in milk and add salt. Knead the dough and let it rest for 15-20 minutes. In a bread machine, this process takes a minimum amount of time.

3. The dough turns out kneaded, dense and elastic.

4. Divide it into two or three parts and roll each of them to the thickness of newspaper into a layer.

5. Cut the layer into strips 1.5-2 cm wide - this width will become the height of the vermicelli, remember this when you cut the strips.

6. Then place the strips one on top of the other and cut into thin, thin cubes - the homemade noodles are completely ready!

7. Now, in order for the cooked pasta to be stored for a long time, it must be thoroughly dried. To do this, pour the vermicelli onto a wide board and spread it over it. Dry in the sun or at room temperature for at least 24 hours, stirring occasionally. You can dry vermicelli in the oven for 1-1.5 hours at 80-100 degrees.

Store the finished semi-finished product in a special container or in a tightly tied bag, using it as needed.

Note to the hostess

1. The key to successful pasta is high-quality flour from a trusted manufacturer. In this case, even from the first grade, you will need only the highest.

2. When you put a tray of noodles in the sun, you definitely need to cover it with something, otherwise dust will inevitably get on the product, insects, and maybe even birds will flock to it. Under the cover of gauze or fine mesh, it will dry perfectly and remain clean, but denser fabric, foil and paper will not provide such conditions, because they will not allow air and sunlight to pass through.

3. Carefully cutting the thinnest dough without deforming the rolled out layer is a difficult task. In such a culinary process, a sharp wheel-shaped knife is indispensable. Its edge can be smooth or jagged. Both options are suitable.

4. To store homemade noodles, it is better to choose a spacious container. The jar should not be filled to the very neck, otherwise its contents in the lower part will crumble under the weight of the top layer. For bulk grocery products, glass containers with screw or ground-in lids are recommended. It is allowed to use food grade plastic, but not metal. It is worth checking periodically to see if moisture has accumulated in the storage.

Pasta products are semi-finished products made from dough mixed with water. After molding, they are thoroughly dried and subsequently used as food in boiled form. In Rus', every housewife knew how to cook homemade pasta. For Italians, for example, the word “dough” is translated as “pasta”. Therefore, this is what such products are called in this country. Pasta has many varieties: vermicelli, spaghetti, fettuccine, noodles and others. Local housewives also like to cook them with their own hands. Moreover, this can be done in different ways.