Old-Fashioned Crank Pasta Maker
Sure, you’ve got your fancy new pasta makers with their plugs and motors and cords … in fact, some of them might be so darned newfangled that they’ve transcended outlets and gone cordless. Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a Bluetooth pasta maker out there somewhere.
But you know what works best? An old-school, crank-it-out kind of pasta machine. You clamp it to the counter, smash the pasta dough into an oblong with your hands, and run the pasta through the wide roller about three times, folding it over in thirds each time so that it will fit the width of the roller. Then you just peg the crank into the spaghetti- or linguini-proportioned roller and crank out your pasta. Hang promptly (see versatile tool below) or gently let plop into a pot of boiling water and cook for 3 minutes. (If you let the pasta dry out overnight and then store it, you’ll have to cook it for at least 5 minutes, probably more.)
Basic pasta dough isn’t too terribly complicated, either — combine 1 cup flour with 1 egg and a tablespoon or two of water, then stir to incorporate. (Add another tablespoonful of water if the dough seems too dry.) Turn dough out onto floured countertop and knead for about 10 minutes, adding more flour as necessary to keep dough from sticking. Cover with a damp kitchen towel and let sit for about 20 minutes before breaking into smaller batches and running them through the pasta machine.
Note: it’s crucial to keep the dough from drying out, so as you’re making pasta out of one batch of dough, keep the other dough balls covered with a damp kitchen towel. Either hang or boil noodles within a minute or two of cranking them out — if you let them sit in a heap, you’ll have a tangled knot of dough.
Another note: it’s entirely possible to make your pasta gluten-free if you’d like. I used 1/2 cup buckwheat and 1/2 cup brown rice flour (hence the dough’s dark color) to make these noodles. The only caveat is that whatever flour you use has to be fine-ground; while rough-milled wheatberries might be full of handy elastic gluten, they would make terrible pasta.
High-Tech Pasta Hanging Method: Two Chairs and a Broom
If you do opt to hang your pasta and dry it, a broom and two chairs are outstanding tools for doing so. Just be sure to clean off the broom handle first!
Let noodles dry overnight and then carefully package them in either an airtight tin or glass container. You might want to line the container with something soft (like a paper towel) to help maintain the structural integrity of the noodles.
Enjoy!
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Tags: brown rice, buckwheat, gluten-free, homemade pasta, noodles, pasta machine
