Fresh Pasta, Eggs and Flour
Flour, eggs, and nothing else. Thirty minutes of work, an hour of resting, and ninety seconds in the water. The simplest recipe on this site and the one most people assume is hard.
- Serves
- 4
- Total
- 1h 30m
Two ingredients. That's the entire shopping list, and it's the reason this is worth doing.
The ratio is the only thing to remember: 100 grams of flour per egg. Four portions is 400 grams and four eggs. You can scale it in your head at the counter, which is not true of most things worth making.
Everything that follows is technique, and technique is free.
If it's not right
- Tough: underkneaded, or not rested.
- Sticky: too much egg or humid flour. More flour on the board, not in the dough.
- Springs back while rolling: it needs another twenty minutes of rest.
- Gummy after cooking: overcooked, or rinsed. Never rinse pasta.
- Bland: the water wasn't salty enough, and nothing downstream fixes that.
Ingredients
Method
-
**Flour on the counter** in a mound, with a well in the middle wide enough to hold the eggs without them escaping.
-
**Eggs into the well.** Break the yolks with a fork and beat them where they sit, pulling flour in from the inner wall of the well a little at a time.
-
**When it's too thick to stir,** bring it together with your hands. It will look wrong and dry. Keep going.
-
**Knead 8 to 10 minutes.** Push with the heel of your hand, fold, turn a quarter, repeat. It goes from shaggy to rough to smooth, and the change is obvious when it happens. You want it smooth and springy, like a firm earlobe.
-
**Wrap it and rest 30 to 60 minutes** at room temperature. This is not optional. The gluten relaxes and the dough goes from fighting you to rolling out easily.
-
**Roll it.** Quarter the dough, keep three pieces covered. Flatten one, then run it through a machine from the widest setting down, folding and re-rolling at the widest two or three times first. Go to the second-thinnest setting for noodles. By rolling pin: flour well, roll from the center out, turn often, and keep going past the point you think you're done.
-
**Cut.** Flour the sheet, roll it loosely, and cut to the width you want. Shake the nest out immediately so it doesn't stick to itself.
-
**Cook 90 seconds to 2 minutes** in water salted like the sea. Fresh pasta is quick and it goes from right to soft fast.
-
**Into the sauce,** not onto it. With a splash of the pasta water. Toss in the pan for 30 seconds so it finishes there.
Goes with
- A cousin of
- Cacio e Pepe, Aglio e Olio, Simple Tomato Sauce, Lemon-Forward Orzo Salad
From the journal
- Italian Is the Other One — Fish is one of the foods people order rather than make. Pasta is the other, and it's the stranger case, because it's flour and eggs.
Comments (0)
No comments yet.
Sign in to rate this, mark it made, or leave a comment.