Amateur pasta-making!

Inspired by Kelly and Sheldon's mixed success with pasta-making (see the assorted posts about gnocchi below), Sophie and I decided to have a go at making this elusive, yet oh-so-common food staple from scratch. With the crucial assistance of friends Nial and Maddy we clamped a borrowed pasta machine to the table and set to work.

I spent most of the mixing process chatting with Nial, and thus missed most of the finer details of pasta making, but from what I could gather, it went something like this:

Nial and Sophie demonstrate the power and passion of home pasta-making

Ingredients
500g whole wheat flour (we used flour grown and milled by Four Leaf)
5 eggs (Kangaroo Island Free Range; apparently you can also substitute the eggs with "a cup of mineral water" - I presume "mineral water" is spring water)
a dash of water

1. Pour the flour into the bowl and make a hollow in the centre. Crack the eggs into the hollow, and mix with a fork until well-blended.
2. Knead with your hands for a while. If it's too dry, add a little water, or if it's too sticky, add a little flour - a good mix shouldn't stick to your hands.
3. Turn the mixture out onto a floured surface and knead further.
4. Cut the dough into pieces, and process each through the pasta machine. The pasta machine has a sequence of different settings to flatten the dough lumps into rolled pieces, adding a little flour with each pass. Following this, there's a couple of additional rollers for for spaghetti or fettuccine. Don't lose heart if you don't have a pasta machine! In Year 6 Italian, we made pasta by rolling the dough out on flour-covered school tables, using knives to slice it into lengths and then draping it on clotheshorses around the classroom.


5. Once the pasta has been sliced into strips, lay it out on tea towels and allow to dry for an hour or more. We made ours on a baking hot (37 degrees) Adelaide day, which no doubt shaved minutes off the drying time!


6. You now have pasta! You can cook it for 5 minutes or so in boiling water to eat it immediately, otherwise, apparently such pasta will keep for a week or so when stored in a cool, dry place.