Home-made Pasta Recipe

The Travels of Marco Polo revealed that pasta was first seen in China and then brought to Italy. Furthermore, the Arabs are found to have ground grains for flour and then boiled it to eat in a similar fashion to pasta. Besides, the origin of spaghetti has been known to be based in the Ancient Greece. Despite all of that, today pasta has come to mean “Italy” in the minds of people.

In today’s culinary world, there are almost 400 kinds of pasta with their original Italian names, categorized according to their length, thickness, width, shape and fillings.

Yet again if you cannot find what kind of pasta you would like to get from the market or you would abstain from buying it from the market thinking “What kind of additives they would contain besides flour?”, it is now possible that you can make your own pasta according to your taste thanks to the following basic recipe.

 

Ingredients

1 kilogram of flour

5-6 eggs

Salt

Add some salt into flour and mound it on a flat surface. Make a crater on top of it and crack the eggs into it. Mix them with your fork and slowly knead the mixture to incorporate all of the ingredients and to make it thick enough not to stick to your hand. If in any case it happens to be thicker than you’d expect, add some milk in order to achieve the expected thickness.

Leave the dough to rest for about half an hour. If you have a machine for that, split it into equal size lumps and use the machine to get rather thin layers of dough. Otherwise, use a rolling pin and some flour to stop it from sticking to the rolling pin and roll out the lumps until you get the perfect thinness.

During this process, use a slightly wet cloth to cover the dough to stop it from drying, because the mixture may dry in a short time.

For the process of cutting it, the easiest way to do it is folding the dough into a flat roll and cutting it into strips. Choose how thick you’d like it to be according to your taste: linguine, tagliatelle, spaghetti, fettucine, pappardelle or lasagna. You’re the chef!

When you’re done with cutting, sprinkle some flour over the pasta and leave it to rest for a short time. Although it is known that pasta is an easy meal to cook, you should pay attention to a few points to cook it duly and achieve the best taste and consistency.

First off, you should be careful about the amount of water. If you use too much water, it would result in the pasta boiling over and spilling over the stove. In the contrary case, if you use little amount of water, it may stick to the pot. Generally, the accepted pasta/water ratio is 1 liter of water for 100 grams of pasta.

 

When the water is boiled, you should add some salt before throwing the pasta in. In addition to that, the common misbelief that you need to use some oil to stop pasta from sticking is absolutely wrong. Because you do NOT need to use oil to cook pasta in any way. To stop pasta from sticking, you just need to stir it a bit while cooking. Doing that, the pasta won’t stick to itself and the pot, and it won’t end up in having an oily surface, which would stop the sauce from sticking to the pasta.

 If you’d like your fresh home-made pasta cooked “al dente” in other words the Italian way which means it will be a bit firm to the bite, 2-3 minutes, or 4-5 minutes will be enough if you’d like it a bit softer. The ones you buy from the market generally need to cook 2-3 times longer than that.

Another false belief about pasta is that you need to rinse it with cold water to rid of its starch before serving. However this process ends up in rinsing all the starch alongside its taste and the ability to stick to the sauce. So, rinsing the pasta is a no-no!

Last but not least, after draining the pasta with a colander, keep a scoop of pasta to mix it with the sauce before pouring it into the whole pasta. I think this way the pasta will be in a better harmony with the sauce.

 

The best accompaniments for the dish could be gorgonzola, an Italian blue cheese which is a combination of milk, garlic and the mushroom of the season OR a side dish made with cambozola cheese and a variety of greenery.

 

Besides, there is a high possibility for numerous sauces that you can create thanks to a rich variety of meat, seafood or delicious plants and herbs. And trust me that almost all of them will be in great harmony with the taste of pasta.

 

Among these pasta-sauce combinations are linguini vongole, penne arabiata, pappardelle with shrimps, tagliatelle with beef tongue, tortelloni with hibiscus or spinach and many more…

 

Out of these combinations it is up to you to create your own recipe with a dash of creativity and courage to go with your own choices…

 

 

 

Bon appetite and enjoy the taste of life…