How to make pasta

So I thought I would do a blog about something a little bit different. My fiancé mentioned that I should do one about making pasta as my mum bought us a pasta machine at Christmas. It's taken a few weeks for us to do it (mainly as we were too lazy to buy the correct flour) but this weekend we decided we would and here's how it went....

We found many different ways of doing it, which was very confusing. So we put our trust in Jamie Oliver and followed his recipe. We needed 300g of 00 flour... We just bought pasta flour, guess it's the same, and 3 eggs. After mixing it together in out hands we noticed it was a bit crumbley so I read the back of the flour packet and mentioned to add some oil, once we did, the mixture came together much easier. This also made the kneeding easier. We kneaded for a couple of minutes and popped it into the fridge for around 30 mins.

I feel like I need to add at this point that when I say we I mean my fiancé... As you know I'm lazy.

After resting in the fridge, we (my fiancé) tore a orange size shape off the dough. We then covered the work top in flour and in turn we proceeded to roll it through the machine. Jamie said to do it through the widest setting and fold over the dough in half and repeated 5-6 times. Once we had done this (now I do mean we, I started to get interested as it looked fun) we worked through the settings from 1-9 which made it very... very thin. We had decided that we were going to make tagliatelle so put it through the cutter, this was very exciting!

It made loads and we only used an orange size amount! So decided we would only use that. We put it in a saucepan with boiling water and salted well. We cooked it for a couple of minutes (we were rebels and didn't follow Jamie) it tasted done so took it off the heat and drained it. Once drained it looked a little slimy. We added some meatballs and a tomato sauce to the pasta. I must admit the pasta did taste a little strange but with the sauce you couldn't really tell. Next time we won't be rebels and research how to cook it!

I would recommend making your own pasta, it's really cool especially with the machine and it is pretty easy. Just make sure you follow the recipe and method, otherwise you will just end up with a mess. Also our recipe said it would serve 2-3 more like 2-300! I'd say 100g of pasta flour and 1 egg with a tsp of oil would be enough for two but I'm not a chef so don't blame me if its not!

Enjoy!

france louise
xoxo