Homemade Noodles

My friend Sher came for supper last Tuesday. Sher loves cooking and eating. So eventhough it was a week day, we decided to make fresh pasta to go with a sauté de veau aux olives (veal sauté with olives). She took care of the pasta, I made the sauté and my  husband got the camera ready.
It took 2  hours total before we sat down and eat. Half hour to make the pasta, half hour to prepare the sauté and 1.5 hours to cook it.
What a treat! Nothing could beat fresh home made pasta. We used a kitchenAid to knead the dough, and although I have a pasta machine, Sher chose to roll it by hand with a wooden rolling pin. She could have allow it to rest, but she wanted to roll it right away and go look at the pictures my husband took in the last two weeks.
Trust me it was not an easy task! The dough has a tendency to "spring" back if you don't let it rest and requires 3 to 4 times more effort to roll. It's a good workout for the biceps, though...

Here is the recipe.

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour

2 eggs

1/4 cup water

1 teaspoon of salt

Directions

Making the dough

Beat the eggs slightly
Put the flour and salt in the food processor, add the eggs and knead for 2 minutes. Revert the dough to your work surface and bring the dough together with your hands. Cover and let rest for 1/2 hour. Put the flour and salt in the food processor, add the eggs and knead for 2-5 minutes, or until the dough forms a ball.
If the dough is too crumbly add a little water.
Revert the dough to your floured work surface and bring the dough together with your hands.
If you want, you can cover and let rest for 1/2 hour. The dough will be easier to roll.

Rolling the pasta

The goal here is to roll out the dough thin enough. Cut the dough into 8 pieces. Dust each piece with flour on both sides. Dust your work surface too.

Roll out each piece in a rectangle flipping the dough over and dusting every so often to make sure it doesn't stick. It’s all right if it’s not perfectly rectangular.

The rectangle size depends on how long you want your pasta to be! ...

Shaping the pasta

The easiest pasta to cut by hand is the tagliatelle. Put a lot of flour on your rolled out dough, and simply roll the dough towards the center of the rectangle from either side, so they meet in the middle.
Don't press down on your dough though, you don't want it to stick! You're supposed to end up with something like this.

All you have to do now, is cut your roll in thin pieces and then unroll them!

 

An easy trick is to insert a chopstick in the middle of the cut rolls and lift.

Your tagliatelles should unroll themselves almost on their own.
 

Dust the pasta with a little more flour and place it on clean kitchen towels until you are ready to cook it.

Cooking the pasta

Cooking freshly made pasta is simple and so fast! Have a colander ready for draining. Throw the pasta into a large saucepan of boiling, salted water, more water than you would use for dried pasta otherwise it will stick together. The general rule is to use about 4 times more water than pasta.

Stir as you add pasta in water. Cook around 2 minutes from the moment the water starts to boil again. It should float at the top.

Dress and serve right away.

Note: I will post the recipe for the sauté de veau aux olives (veal sauté with olives) next time.