Making pasta for the very first time

Oh yeah.

That worked.

It was a bit fiddly with the fettucini plate. The noodles were
paper-thin at first, and wanted to scrunch up, but I took the advice of
the book and kept feeding it back until about 10 inches had come out,
then it began to flow better. Then the problem became separating about
16 wide, flat noodles before they could stick together again. I ended
up making about 8-inch pieces and feeding a quarter to a half of them
back continuously. Eventually I ended up with 3 ounces of usable
noodles and about 3 ounces of spare dough.

3 ounces is a reasonable serving for a person who's not trying to gain
weight, so I figured that was as good a place to stop as any.

One good thing about pasta dough: it's practically self-cleaning. It
releases from the crannies of the grinder with minimal swipe of a
finger. I can't imagine how ugly cleanup is going to be after I pass a
pound of fatty pork through the thing, though...

I had planned to just try out the machine, get a feel for the process,
learn a few things, and put the noodles in the fridge for the night,
but after I got a look at them you know there was no way.

I dumped an inch and a half of water into a pot, tossed in a fat pinch
of salt, whacked the knob up to HI, and got out the parm-reg and
penzey's italian herbs and extra-virgin olive oil. Barely 60 seconds
of boiling later, I combined and plated, then forked and faced.

Dee-lish.

As expected, the bleached AP wheat flour made for a bland, if
wonderfully textured, pasta. A half-grind of black pepper punched it
up a little. Tomorrow I'll be shopping for 00 durum semolina.

--Blair

Blair,

Interesting read. I wish you luck in your pasta making.

If you don't mind some commentary... to really appreciate pasta you have
to do it the manual way first. Before using the fancy-scmancy mixer, get
your hands dirty and mix the dough with your (clean) bare hands. Learn
the texture of the dough, the consistancy that ensures the best rolling.
Buy the simpliest rolling pin and practice, practice, practice. You
think all those little old Italian grandmothers have fancy pasta
machines? No, they have their hands, a rolling pin, and a sharp knife.
And maybe a little egg wash or water to help seal the edges of stuffed
pastas. That's it.

Enjoy.

Blair P. Houghton said:

Cat's going out of town for a while, so she's letting me hold onto her
kitchenaid mixer. She's made about a billion cakes on this thing. I
wanted it more for its ability to take a grinder attachment, because I
have sausage dreams. While I was shopping for that I discovered the
pasta plates.

The pasta kit comes with some useless pieces like a funny container for
the parts, a stupid little cleaner that could be replaced by any
toothpick, and some clips that are only needed for the lever-lifted
versions of the KA mixer. I chucked those and only kept the plates.
They make one for angel hair, spaghetti, fettucini, macaroni, and
lasagne. Nothing for ziti or linguini, but the KA website forum seems
to have clueful employees and maybe those will be forthcoming. My only
trepidation here is that the pasta plates are plastic. I've heard
stories of brass plates being worn out by hard-wheat flours, but maybe
that's only at industrial production rates. I'm making quarter-pound
batches.

So right now my second attempt at dough is resting/rising. The first
was spoiled when I misread the instructions and added 1/4 cup water
instead of adding water to make 1/4 cup liquid including the egg; I was
considering cooking it to see what would come out, but my guess was
"hardtack".

I'm using AP flour. If it's passable I'll buy some 00 flour tomorrow
and get real jiggy. It'll go nice with the sauce I'm going to make
with the canned San Marzano tomatoes I got, and I'll grab some pork
shoulder and grind up a little salsiccia.

Oops. There's the timer. If you need me, I'll be extruding.

--Blair

Blair P. Houghton said:

One good thing about pasta dough: it's practically self-cleaning. It
releases from the crannies of the grinder with minimal swipe of a
finger. I can't imagine how ugly cleanup is going to be after I pass a
pound of fatty pork through the thing, though...

Secret to clean a meat grinder after running fatty meats through it is
to run day old bread through it until it's visably clean.

The posts from a few years ago found the pasta extruder uniformly
lousy. The pasta roller and cutter attachments, however, work fine.

Good luck.

Blair P. Houghton said:

Cat's going out of town for a while, so she's letting me hold onto her
kitchenaid mixer. She's made about a billion cakes on this thing. I
wanted it more for its ability to take a grinder attachment, because I
have sausage dreams. While I was shopping for that I discovered the
pasta plates.

The pasta kit comes with some useless pieces like a funny container for
the parts, a stupid little cleaner that could be replaced by any
toothpick, and some clips that are only needed for the lever-lifted
versions of the KA mixer. I chucked those and only kept the plates.
They make one for angel hair, spaghetti, fettucini, macaroni, and
lasagne. Nothing for ziti or linguini, but the KA website forum seems
to have clueful employees and maybe those will be forthcoming. My only
trepidation here is that the pasta plates are plastic. I've heard
stories of brass plates being worn out by hard-wheat flours, but maybe
that's only at industrial production rates. I'm making quarter-pound
batches.

So right now my second attempt at dough is resting/rising. The first
was spoiled when I misread the instructions and added 1/4 cup water
instead of adding water to make 1/4 cup liquid including the egg; I was
considering cooking it to see what would come out, but my guess was
"hardtack".

I'm using AP flour. If it's passable I'll buy some 00 flour tomorrow
and get real jiggy. It'll go nice with the sauce I'm going to make
with the canned San Marzano tomatoes I got, and I'll grab some pork
shoulder and grind up a little salsiccia.

Oops. There's the timer. If you need me, I'll be extruding.

--Blair

PastaLover said:

Blair P. Houghton said:

One good thing about pasta dough: it's practically self-cleaning. It
releases from the crannies of the grinder with minimal swipe of a
finger. I can't imagine how ugly cleanup is going to be after I pass a
pound of fatty pork through the thing, though...

Secret to clean a meat grinder after running fatty meats through it is
to run day old bread through it until it's visably clean.

I just use a bottle brush and soapy water. Actually, it's a bong
brush I bought at the head-shop a bunch of years ago. It's now
a bottle brush.

I could just throw it in the dishwasher, too. Why waste good
bread?

-sw

Blair P. Houghton said:

I'm using AP flour. If it's passable I'll buy some 00 flour tomorrow
and get real jiggy. It'll go nice with the sauce I'm going to make
with the canned San Marzano tomatoes I got, and I'll grab some pork
shoulder and grind up a little salsiccia.

Oops. There's the timer. If you need me, I'll be extruding.

--Blair

Pasta Dough
900 gm plain flour
100 gm semolina
7 eggs
3 egg yolks
pinch of salt
2 tabsp olive oil
Put the flour and semolina in a mound on a pasta board or bench top.
Use a fork to make a well in the centre and put the eggs, egg yolks,
salt and oil in the well. Use a fork to mix together the contents of
the well and incorporate the flour from the
inner rim of the well.
Start kneading the dough by hand to get an elastic ball of dough - this
takes about 20 minutes or so and is pretty hard work - the dough should
be glossy and elastic; then finish kneading by hand or with the rollers
of a pasta machine. Stretch the pasta to the thickness you need with a
rolling pin or with the pasta machine. Cut the pasta into the shape you
need manually using a knife or pastry wheel, or the the cutting
attachments of the pasta machine.
For Tagliatelle, stretch the pasta to a thickness of less than 1/16
inch
by hand, or with a pasta machine to the finest setting. Cut into strips
1/4 inch wide. Let them rest until needed. Depending on the weather the
pasta may stick together - have a length of broom handle (covered in
aluminium foil, greased well with olive oil) and drape the pasta
strands over the handle, which helps in air drying and non-sticking.
Bring a pot of salted water to the boil then add the pasta and cook for
about 1 - 2 minutes depending on the dryness of the pasta, after the
water has returned to the boil.. Drain the pasta and add it to sauce.

When I bought my food processor (with kneading attachment) I tried
making pasta in it and it was no where near as good as the pasta made
by hand ... IMHO.
Pasta kneading can be very therapeutic.... but you can understand why
some Italian women have upper arms like legs of ham! (NO INSULT
INTENDED!!!!) After my first two or three pasta making binges my arms
were useless for anything else!!! (and yes, my upper arms are
developing a nice hamish quality,...lol)
There really isn't any way to short cut the kneading process and get a
quality product at the end, but if you persevere it is well worth the
effort.

cheers and happy kneading,

LadyJane
--
"Never trust a skinny cook!"

Louis Cohen said:

The posts from a few years ago found the pasta extruder uniformly
lousy. The pasta roller and cutter attachments, however, work fine.

Seconded. The rollers are outstanding, the extruders almost
ruined my motor.

--
Reg

Blair P. Houghton said:

Oops. There's the timer. If you need me, I'll be extruding.

--Blair

I have a pasta extruder and roller/cutter. Extruded does not have as good
of texture as rolled and cut.

"Blair P. Houghton" <[email hidden]> wrote in
news:[email hidden]:

Quoted message said:

Cat's going out of town for a while, so she's letting me hold onto her
kitchenaid mixer. She's made about a billion cakes on this thing. I
wanted it more for its ability to take a grinder attachment, because I
have sausage dreams. While I was shopping for that I discovered the
pasta plates.

That was my first homemade pasta event. I bought the roller and cutter
attachments. I followed the recipe that came with the pasta accessories
and used semolina flour.

It was a stunning success, fettuccine with homemade pesto. The only
problem I had was rolling it out to the 8 notch and having an
unmanageable 12-foot strip of pasta to handle.

On later pastas, I strung a string from one side of the sink to the other
and bought new plastic coat hangers and rolled out smaller hunks of pasta
and then would cut the 2-feet lenghts and gather them onto the coat
hangers and put them on the string to dry while I continued.

It was always a fun mess and the pasta always tasted great. I would add
tumeric or yellow food coloring to the dough to give it a golden color
rather than the pale yellow of normal pasta (for pesto'd pasta only).

Good for you! Fresh homemade pasta is the best!

Andy

Reg said:

Louis Cohen said:

The posts from a few years ago found the pasta extruder uniformly
lousy. The pasta roller and cutter attachments, however, work fine.

Seconded. The rollers are outstanding, the extruders almost
ruined my motor.

I noticed it was bogging down at first, but got much more peppy in the
middle. I think it needs the dough to be slightly warmed, or a little
moister. This recipe (110g or 3/4 level cups AP flour, one x-large AA
egg, a teaspoon or so of water) didn't include salt, though most do;
and I wonder if the salt has some chemical purpose in modulating the
stiffness.

How do you make extruded shapes like spaghetti and macaroni without
extrusion equipment?

Also, on playing around a bit, I realized that the toys are just that,
and anyone can make orecchietti, cavatelli, gnocchetti, or troffietti*
without so much as a rolling pin. Just pinch off a bit of dough and
apply fingers.

--Blair

* - Orecchietti are "ears" that look more like cockle shells; cavatelli
are like orecchietti that have been rolled inward on two sides;
gnocchetti are gnocchi shapes in plain pasta; and trofietti are like
twisted rags: just press the pinch of dough into a rough noodle and
roll it between your thumb and fingers a bit - you make these almost
subconsciously the first time you start fiddling with the stuff.

"Blair P. Houghton" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Oh yeah.

That worked.

It was a bit fiddly with the fettucini plate. The noodles were
paper-thin at first, and wanted to scrunch up, but I took the advice of
the book and kept feeding it back until about 10 inches had come out,
then it began to flow better. Then the problem became separating about
16 wide, flat noodles before they could stick together again. I ended
up making about 8-inch pieces and feeding a quarter to a half of them
back continuously. Eventually I ended up with 3 ounces of usable
noodles and about 3 ounces of spare dough.

3 ounces is a reasonable serving for a person who's not trying to gain
weight, so I figured that was as good a place to stop as any.

One good thing about pasta dough: it's practically self-cleaning. It
releases from the crannies of the grinder with minimal swipe of a
finger. I can't imagine how ugly cleanup is going to be after I pass a
pound of fatty pork through the thing, though...

I had planned to just try out the machine, get a feel for the process,
learn a few things, and put the noodles in the fridge for the night,
but after I got a look at them you know there was no way.

I dumped an inch and a half of water into a pot, tossed in a fat pinch
of salt, whacked the knob up to HI, and got out the parm-reg and
penzey's italian herbs and extra-virgin olive oil. Barely 60 seconds
of boiling later, I combined and plated, then forked and faced.

Dee-lish.

As expected, the bleached AP wheat flour made for a bland, if
wonderfully textured, pasta. A half-grind of black pepper punched it
up a little. Tomorrow I'll be shopping for 00 durum semolina.

--Blair

With the pasta plates, the dough has to be a lot dryer than I thought was
normal, but if it's too wet, you get a lot of sticking. If it's dry enough,
the strands separate well enough. And we're talking differences of a
half-teaspoon here. It's pretty darned finicky. But it's fun and one of
these days I'm going to try the hollow noodle plate and see how that goes.

If you really get into pasta-making mode, they've also got the roller gizmo
that's pretty slick. I've got an old hand-crank model, but cranking that
thing can get old pretty fast, not to mention that you sort of need 3
hands -- one to crank, one to feed the dough, and one to catch it. With the
kitchenaid thing, you feed with one hand, catch with the other, and it's
fast and easy. And you can use wetter doughs, and fiddle with the recipes a
lot more, because it's more forgiving than the extruder. The set I got came
with the roller and some cutters -- I think 3.

There's also a ravioli thing, but after I read the reviews, I didn't buy it.
It's a manual crank unit that you attach to the kitchenaid, which seems kind
of silly. When I made ravioli a month or so ago, I used the Kitchenaid to
make the dough and roll the sheets, and I used the old hand-crank unit for
making the ravioli. That way I could go right from making sheets to filling
the ravioli.

Of course, you could make the ravioli by hand, too.

Geez, now I'm thinking about noodles...

Donna

Blair P. Houghton said:

Reg said:

Louis Cohen said:

The posts from a few years ago found the pasta extruder uniformly
lousy. The pasta roller and cutter attachments, however, work fine.

Seconded. The rollers are outstanding, the extruders almost
ruined my motor.

I noticed it was bogging down at first, but got much more peppy in the
middle. I think it needs the dough to be slightly warmed, or a little
moister. This recipe (110g or 3/4 level cups AP flour, one x-large AA
egg, a teaspoon or so of water) didn't include salt, though most do;
and I wonder if the salt has some chemical purpose in modulating the
stiffness.

How do you make extruded shapes like spaghetti and macaroni without
extrusion equipment?

You can't, though you can theoretically roll
spaghetti by hand. It's not something I go for.

Quoted message said:

Also, on playing around a bit, I realized that the toys are just that,
and anyone can make orecchietti, cavatelli, gnocchetti, or troffietti*
without so much as a rolling pin. Just pinch off a bit of dough and
apply fingers.

Another suggestion: experiment with different flour mixes. I like
to mix in things like buckwheat, chickpea flour, etc.

--
Reg

Andy said:

On later pastas, I strung a string from one side of the sink to the other
and bought new plastic coat hangers and rolled out smaller hunks of pasta
and then would cut the 2-feet lenghts and gather them onto the coat
hangers and put them on the string to dry while I continued.

Made spaghetti last night.

Did 1/3 semolina (this stuff is coarser than I think it should be) and
2/3 AP flour. Made a bigger batch (1-1/2 cups total flour instead of
3/4).

I pulled it off the extruder at about 12 inch length and hung it over
strings wound between two chair-backs. I think I'll buy some dowelling
- or better yet, half-round - for this, though. When the spaghettis
hang on the strings they tend to converge, making it impossible to pull
them off. So I ended up breaking most of them by pinching at the
string, making 6-inch noodles.

This batch was much more delicate than the all-AP batch was. I was
afraid it would crumble when it hit the boiling water. It held up
okay, but made a bit of a puffy, insubstantial noodle, even at al
dente. I think the coarseness of the semolina may have trapped too
much air in the dough. The exterior texture was squamous.

And the sauce wasn't quite right. Not enough herbs, I think.

I've done and will do better.

--Blair