My Zia Angelina lives in Ripi, Frosinone, and I see her every time I visit Italy. I will spend the day with her and we will reminisce about everything – she'll tell the story about the time she came to Vancouver and stayed with us when I was 7, and how we went for a walk and I fell. We'll talk about my cousin Marco and how his life is going in Pavia, Italy. We'll sit under her gazebo overlooking the vineyards that grow the grapes she sells to local winemakers and just chat about life in general.
And we'll have a big Italian lunch, and it always includes pasta that she makes from scratch. Zia Angelina never uses packaged pasta. Ever since I was little, I remember her standing in her kitchen rolling pasta dough with her pasta machine, cranking the handle to get the dough to the perfect thickness. She would usually make spaghetti, and I remember vividly each spaghetti "nest" resting on the table ready to be boiled and eaten.
I decided to pay tribute to Zia Angelina by making my own handmade pasta. I called her to get the "recipe" and she responded with "just mix flour and eggs together and a bit of olive oil if you want." So that's what I did. Since I didn't have a pasta maker, I bought the KitchenAid pasta attachment (since I already had the stand mixer) which I thought would be a good substitute for the pasta machine.
I thought making fresh handmade pasta would be labour-intensive and take tons of time. Turns out, I was wrong. Way wrong. It didn't take long at all and was actually quite easy to do. I don't know why I was so intimidated! It's kind of like pizza dough- intimidating to think about making it, but once you do, it's not bad at all and EASY.
The end result was delicious. The pasta was light and had an amazing texture, one that can't be compared to packaged pasta.
Turns out, Zia Angelina had it right along.
Making fresh, homemade pasta dough isn't hard! This simple recipe takes the guesswork out of making the dough, and using the KitchenAid pasta attachment makes it extra easy.
In a mixing bowl, add flour. Make a well in the center of the flour and add the eggs. Add olive oil to the eggs.
In the bowl, start mixing the ingredients together with your hands, about one minute.
Once you have a work-able "ball," that holds together (it will still be crumbly at this point), transfer the dough to a working surface, whether that's a table, or a wooden board.
On your working surface, knead the dough until it's yellow in colour and holds together nicely. This takes me about 10 minutes, but depending on your strength, it could be more or less time. When kneading, you will notice that there's always an "open" side to the dough, where the dough looks like it's cracking and about to open. Try to keep this open side face up when you're kneading.
Form dough into a ball and wrap in saran wrap and let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.
Attach your pasta roller attachment to the power hub of your KitchenAid stand mixer.
On a lightly floured surface, cut your ball of pasta dough into 3 equal-sized pieces. Flatten each piece with your hands.
Lightly flour your hands. On speed 2 and setting 1 on the pasta roller, feed one piece of flattened dough through the roller. Once it has gone through, fold the dough into 3, rotate and feed through again. Rotating the dough is what makes it rectangular in shape. Repeat this process two more times until you've fed all sides of the dough through at setting 1.
Now change your roller setting to 2 and feed the dough through the roller once. Keep flouring your hands if dough is sticky.
Keep feeding the dough through on each roller setting (only once) until you've reaching setting 7. I found this was a good thickness for fettucine. Set your dough sheet aside and repeat these steps for the remaining pieces of dough.
You now have basic, work-able pasta dough sheets! You can make spaghetti, fettucine, ravioli. tortellini, whatever you want from this dough.
Grab a sheet of pasta dough and cut it into about 3 equal pieces. If you feed the whole sheet through without cutting, your fettucine will probably be too long to eat.
Add the fettucine attachment to the power hub of your KitchAid stand mixer. On speed 2, feed the pasta dough sheet through.
On a floured baking sheet, place each set of linguine on the baking sheet into a pile or "nest" shape if you will.
This recipe will serve 4 people, but if you want to make more or less pasta dough, a general rule of thumb to follow is: use 1 egg per 100 grams of flour. Ie. if you use 500g of flour, use 5 eggs.
If you can, when you're kneading your dough, knead on a surface that's room temperature like a table or large wood cutting board. I've heard that if you knead on a cold surface like marble or quartz, the dough won't turn out as well.