Pasta all'Uovo (Ricetta Base) - Fresh Pasta Dough (Basic Recipe)

One of the most fun things about getting married is the cool kitchenware you can register for. My aunts had a shower for me a few weeks ago and it was my lovely mother who got me the gift-most-useful-in-conjunction-with-SS: a pasta machine and a food mill.

I couldn't wait to bring it home and make some pasta! The first Sunday that I had free, I brought it out and invited some friends over for dinner. The basic recipe seemed to be a good place to start, although, true to form, I couldn't just use regular flour and follow the recipe. No no, I had to try to make the pasta using 100% whole wheat pastry flour. I'd recently bought a wide array of different types of flours searching to use as substitutes for more nutritious baking and figured I'd start swapping different types of flour into the recipes I made. It probably would have been wise if I had any idea how to make pasta dough to have a sense of texture before I started but when has that ever stopped me before?

I replaced the 1 and 3/4 cups of flour with the same amount of whole wheat pastry flour, mixed in a pinch of salt and built a mound on my counter. I beat two eggs together and poured them into the well in the center then frantically tried to mix in the flour before the ran off all over the counter. I then kneaded the dough for about ten minutes. I wasn't sure what the texture should feel like at this point, but left it to rest for 15 minutes. When I started working with it again and tried to pass it through the pasta machine, it fell apart too quickly, so I decided to knead it some more.

At this point, Big E and I, along with our dinner guests, were beginning to get hungrier and less confident of our likelihood of eating in the near future, so Big E jumped on board. It was then that this shower gift showed its great potential for our household: the pasta rolling process worked best when we did it together. I fed the pasta in with one hand and collected the rolled sheet with the other while E cranked the handle.

Not too long after, we had a whole series of sheets (not all that soon either... it took us a while to figure this out). At this point, I decided I was too hungry to deal with figuring out how to use the fettucine slicing attachment, so I just sliced them by hand.

The pasta was absolutely delicious! It cooked in less than a minute and was fluffy and very flavourful. I made a very simple onion sauce with it so that the pasta was properly showcased. While the recipe worked out quite well, I feel that a lot of that was due to our trial and error and not so much to the instructions in the recipe. I've since checked a couple of other recipes for fresh pasta to see if I could get any useful tricks and found pages of description compared to this mere one paragraph.

That being said, how do I rate this recipe? Homemade pasta is delicious and I would give the taste an A. The recipe, however, was not all that helpful. But my rating system has not been so much for the effectiveness of the recipe, but the end result.

Tasty Factor: A Ease of Preparation: C- Modifications: Yes. Whole wheat pastry flour instead of white.