Pasta is popular both in home and restaurant cuisine; sauces add variety to the dish. However, the quality of the pasta itself is also of great importance. Fresh, freshly cooked pasta is especially tasty. Even an inexperienced housewife can handle the production of fusilli, tagliatteli and other popular types.
DIY pasta: how to cook it properly at home
Real Italian pasta is made with just a few ingredients: flour, water, salt, eggs. Natural colors are sometimes used, such as spinach puree, dried tomatoes, or cuttlefish ink extract. Artificial flavors, stabilizers and other ingredients are excluded.
When making homemade pasta, you need to consider the quality of all products. Only premium durum wheat flour is used. It provides the desired consistency of the dough, ready-made pasta does not stick together and does not boil over, retaining an attractive appearance and pronounced taste. The exception is egg noodles, which can be made from soft flours with the mandatory addition of fresh chicken eggs. For every 100 g of flour, you will need 1 medium-sized egg.
Before kneading, the flour must be sieved. This removes impurities and oxygenates the product. The dough will be more pliable and uniform. If the flour has been sifted in advance, the process is repeated just before cooking. It is important that the product does not have any foreign odors, they will affect the quality of the paste.
The dough is kneaded for at least 15 minutes on a wooden board sprinkled with flour. It stretches and folds many times. In the process, gluten develops, the mass becomes elastic and smooth. However, you should not knead the dough for too long, this can destroy the gluten, the pasta will turn out to be tough.
After kneading, the lump of dough is wrapped in foil and put away for rest. It is best to place it in a refrigerator or other cool place. After half an hour, you can start rolling.
For the preparation of pasta, a special machine with seating arrangements of different sizes is used. It allows you to make thin spaghetti, rolls and other popular types of pasta. However, a tasty product is easy to prepare without a typewriter, by rolling out the dough on the work surface and cutting it with a sharp knife. You will get medium or wide ribbons (tagliatteli, fetuccini, buchelatti). If ready-made strips are cut into rectangles, you get papardelle plates.
The dough is rolled out on both sides, sprinkling the rolling pin with flour. The ideal bed thickness is 2 mm. It is convenient to cut it into strips with a sharp wide knife, periodically dipping it in flour. You can use special cutters with a curly edge.
The finished pasta is boiled immediately, but if you want to leave it until next time, you will have to dry the pasta. There are special tabletop accessories on sale, but housewives successfully use conventional clothes dryers. The strips of paste are carefully hung up and left for a day. The blanks need to be sprinkled with flour and covered with a paper towel to protect them from dust. When the paste dries, it is placed in dry glass or plastic containers with tight lids. Pasta is stored at room temperature for a month.
For longer storage, the paste should be frozen. Immediately after rolling it is sprinkled with flour, laid out on a board and placed in the freezer. When the products freeze, they are placed in a bag and left in the freezer. The pasta will remain fresh for up to six months, you do not need to defrost it before cooking.
Egg paste: a classic recipe
One popular homemade option is egg tagliatteli or fettuccine. They have a rich taste and a pleasant pale yellow color, suitable for immediate cooking or freezing.
Ingredients:
- 300 g flour;
- 3 medium sized eggs;
- a pinch of sea salt.
The flour is sifted into a large bowl. Eggs and salt are added to a small depression in the center. The mass is kneaded by hand for at least 15 minutes. When the dough is sufficiently homogeneous, it is removed from the bowl and kneaded on a board, stretching into a layer and folding several times. Correctly kneaded dough is firm but not stiff. It is collected in a lump, wrapped in plastic wrap and put into the refrigerator for half an hour.
The wooden board and rolling pin are sprinkled with flour. The dough is rolled out into a thin layer, turned over and rolled out again until its thickness does not exceed 2 mm. The layer is rolled up and cut into equal lengths with a sharp knife. The strips can be wide or narrow, it all depends on the dish that you plan to cook. The thicker the sauce, the thicker the paste should be.
The mini rolls are unrolled and the pasta is left to dry. After 30-60 minutes, you can start cooking. So that the taste of homemade noodles does not suffer, they are boiled in salted boiling water immediately before mixing with the sauce.
