Homemade Pasta with the Kids

Well, after nearly 17 years, I finally did it. I took out our Atlas Pasta Maker and the kids and I made pasta together. I've made pasta lots of times with my dad when I was a kid and since then have hand rolled pasta before the kids were born. But, I had forgotten how much fun it is!

The pasta we made (cappellini) was delicate and delicious. And it really is worth it to try and make. Even if you don't have the Atlas Pasta roller, you can use a rolling pin to roll out the dough as thin as possible and "hand cut" it into strips. Or, cut it into squares and make raviolis or dumplings.

Here is the recipe....

2 cups of flour (I used plain old white flour)
2 eggs
2 egg yolks

1. Mound the flour in a pile on the counter.
2. Make a well in the center.
3. Gently beat the eggs and yolks together and put in the center of the "well" of flour.
4. Using a fork, stir the eggs, bringing down little bits of flour from the sides into the eggs. Keep mixing until you can't really stir with the fork anymore, then use your hands to bring the dough together and gently knead the dough. It will not be smooth, so don't worry about that. It will also be a bit sticky. Add a bit more flour if it is too wet, or a couple of drops of water if you can't get it to come together too well.
5. Once it has come together, pat it into a round disk, cover with plastic wrap and put in the fridge for about 1 hour.

Rolling out the pasta.

Since we have the rolling machine, it makes this a bit easier. But basically what you are doing is thinning out the dough enough to make pasta. So, the first thing we did was to cut off a small piece and run it through the pasta maker a couple of times to finish kneading the dough, folding in thirds each time to really smooth it out. Next we ran it through the largest setting (1). Then we decreased the setting to 2 and ran the pasta through. We continued doing this until we reached setting 7. (I think I may stop at 6 in the future, but we were having so much fun!!!)

You can see from the pictures that the dough gets longer and thinner each time. Once you reach desired thinness, put the pasta through the "cutting" part of the machine. Or, you can cut it by hand into thin strips using a pizza cutter or roll it into a long "log" and cut the noodles. There are a bunch of websites that show you how to do this.

Once the pasta is cut, toss it with a bit of flour to separate the noodles. Cook in lots of boiling, salted water for 1-2 minutes.

Toss with some olive oil, freshly grated parmesan and YUMMY!!!!!