This is the standard recipe from the manufacturer of the Pasta Queen® pasta-making machine. Making pasta fresh isn’t an epiphanic experience, but generally the pasta is better than the dried stuff you get from your grocer. And, of course, it’s a good way to create pastas, like orechiette, you cannot get from your store if you can figure out how to make them.
Mlinzi
This is nothing more than shards of standard, home-made pasta sheets that are dried out in the oven before cooking normally. It is from Isteria, an ethnic-Italian part of Croatia. There, according to Lydia Bastianich, an Istrian herself, it is cooked with a sauce and served with roast goose. I am adapting it to enhance my Chicken provençal since that is the closest dish I can make (where I live, goose is extremely seasonal if you can find it at all).
(See my page on types of pasta.)
Yield
Count on 2-4 ounces of pasta per person, dry, and depending on whether the pasta is the main dish or an accompaniment.
This recipe scales well, of course (double the flour, double the eggs), but you can diminish the ration of eggs to flour slightly as you multiply it.
Ingredients
| 5 | eggs |
| 1 lb | all-purpose flour |
| — | olive oil |
| — | water |
Preparation
You can make the dough mostly in the food processor or knead the eggs into a volcano made of the flour by hand. The latter process takes a very long time.
To soften the dough, use a little olive oil and/or water. Continue to knead until a bit like PlayDo®.
The Pasta Queen has attachments that will make spaghetti, fettucine (tagliatelli) or just use the roller to make sheets for ravioli, tortellini, lasagna or other pastas you cut by hand.
Make sheets using not quite the thinnest setting (6). Spread out on half sheet and back in oven at low temperature for 15-20 minutes or until golden (but not brown). Break into shards before cooking in water just as ordinary pasta. If using in a sauce, cook less long and finish in the sauce.
Lydia's dough
This is made in your food processor and it just as good as the recipe above.
| 4 | eggs |
| 3 cups | all-purpose flour |
| 1 tsp | olive oil |
| — | warm water |
Put the flour in a food processor and light it up. Pour the eggs and olive oil through the top into the flour as it's turning. Add water in tiny amounts just until the mixture is no longer too dry.
Knead the dough a bit over a floured surface, roll into a ball and cover with plastic wrap, resting for at least an hour at room temperature (or up to one day in the refrigerator).