I just love me a good old pasta especially during summer time. The air is hot and humid, the tomatoes are bigger and tastefuller than ever, and the basil is florishing and just waiting to be used as a garnish on a red sauce.
Now I was having this abundance of eggs from taking care of the chicken and these were more eggs than I would regularly eat. It was weekend and there was a lot of time to actually make something. So it was time to actually use the eggs in a dish and make something out of them.
Why not make some pasta from scratch? Everyone says it is so easy you would be stupid not to do it.
So I went for it with these easy ingredients:
-300 grams of flour (nothing fancy. often there is spoken about the way more fine flower called 00, but I used the regular one that I use for everything)
-3 eggs
-3 half a teaspoon of salt.
Expectation versus reality
You start by placing your flour in a circle with a hole in the middle. In this hole that is where you place your eggs and your salt as well. Now the whole world of youtube and instagram says that you can take a little fork and gently start mixing the eggs into the wall of flour until it turns into a nice paste.
The reality is that once you start moving the eggs, that the flour does not immediately stick to the egg and your egg and flour volcano erupts earlier than the blending process is finished.
Egg everywhere!! But hey it was already calculated that would turn into a jumbo mess so why not use the whole kitchen counter to mix it all together. I don't know who is able do this without making a kitchen bomb.
After added everything together you need to knead this dough ball firmly for like 10 minutes. Because of this action the dough will become more elastic. And that is some serious muscle work for 10 minutes!!
Eventually your dough ball looks like this and then you can give it a rest for 30 minutes. Again...elasticity...
Making the pasta
Now let me start by mentioning that I do not have one of this pasta-turning-thingies with knives in there. That means my spaghetti will turn out more like tagliatelle, because I have to cut them manually.
I took my pasta ball and cut it into 4 pieces. Those 4 pieces will all be rolled out with a rolling pin into a long flat piece.
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After making the long dough you can roll it up. That big roll you cut into small little layers. All of this has to be done while using a lot of flour still, because everything sticks like crap in there.
After making the little rolls you out-roll them again so they have the option to dry a bit more. As you can see mine a a bit thick and what I also noticed is that the dough also pulled back from stretching into its original form again. The pasta wants to be thick!!
Although I love the little piles of pasta all of this takes a while. All that time the pasta has the ability to dry a bit more and so I decided to hang them so also the process of shrinking stops again.
People who do this more often probably have a device where you can hang them on. I don't have that ofcourse, so I used a cutting board to hang them over.
No, this is not a mop. This is the pasta hanging and drying. You can also see the size is a bit different the whole time. I don't mind, this is because of how I rolled and cut them.
And....presto!!
The pasta needs only 3 minutes in boiling water and it is ready to go. Now this whole story started with that I had too many eggs. That made me go for the carbonara sauce instead of a red sauce because I could also use three eggs for that as well.
That in combination with some cheese and pancetta ham was just a genius dish!! Yummie!!
Now looking at how long everything took me. The dough took about a whole hour to make and the carbonara also took like 15 minutes or so.
I really did like the flavour of the dough honestly and considering when you have your eggs for free, this is totally the good tasting budget option. But when you have to buy your (currently expensive) eggs and also have to make the dough....that is a lot of work.
I was very satisfied with the tasty result honestly! Would I do it again? I'm not entirely sure hahahaha