How to Make Fresh Pasta

Today we talk to you about how to make fresh pasta, because if you've ever tried fresh pasta you'll know how little it has to do with the traditional dried pasta we're used to — it surpasses it in every way.

But if this fresh pasta is homemade and just made, we raise the level of taste and pleasure. Homemade fresh pasta not only has a different texture and more flavor on its own, but it absorbs the flavors of sauces and accompaniments much better.

Fresh pasta can be made at home with various tools, which save us more or less work:

1. By hand and rolling it out with a rolling pin, like the genuine nonnas did.
2. With a home pasta machine, a simple device that refines and thins the pasta dough and can even cut it into various shapes.
3. With a robot food-processor pasta attachment, like the one that can be attached to the KitchenAid.

The fresh pasta recipe

Fresh pasta dough is very simple, because in its simplest version it only contains eggs and durum wheat flour (not just any flour will do), in a proportion of 220 g of flour for every 2 medium eggs (or in other words, 110 g of flour per egg you add), as shown to us by the Simili sisters in the book Pasta Fresca.

This book is a classic of Italian cuisine and an essential guide to properly learning how to make genuine Italian pasta, which we highly recommend. The book is delightful to read because it feels like your Italian grandmother is explaining everything to you.

This dough, which after mixing the ingredients is very coarse, must be refined by flattening it with a rolling pin and folding it repeatedly, but this refining can be done very comfortably with a fresh pasta machine.

Book "Pasta fresca" by the Simili sisters and Imperia machine (step by step for fresh pasta with truffle butter)

The home pasta machine

A pasta machine, like the Imperia machine, consists of two smooth rollers that not only refine the prepared dough, which must be passed through them repeatedly until it reaches the required thinness and thickness, but can also cut the dough into tagliatelle, spaghetti, etc.

Also, the process of making pasta with this manual machine that operates with a crank appeals to little ones, who should always be involved in the kitchen.

The machine clamps to the work table with a screw clamp and the dough is passed through it repeatedly until the desired thickness is obtained. It has an attachment to cut pasta into spaghetti (2 mm) or fettuccine (6.5 mm). You can see how it works in our recipe for fresh pasta with truffle butter.

If we are not going to eat all the pasta immediately, it's advisable to let it dry, for which there are very cute pasta dryers from the same brand.

With the pasta machine you can also prepare simple sheets to make lasagna or even to use for ravioli, like those you can make with this simple Ravioli mold Set with rolling pin included. You can also make ravioli without a mold, cutting them with a ravioli cutter or cutting the pasta sheets into tagliatelle with decorative edges using this cutting wheel.

As you can see, the equipment needed to make fresh pasta is simple and manual, except for the KitchenAid pasta attachment. And you don't know the little thrill of making your own fresh pasta. But above all, what pleases most is that the result is magnificent. We leave you two final suggestions of fresh pasta dishes from the blog, some beet tagliatelle with gorgonzola sauce and some fettuccine with eggplant and cherry tomatoes.