How to Dry Fresh Pasta for Future Use : Cooking Advice

[Music] hi everybody I'm huano and I'm with food on the Dole today I'm at The Chopping Block in Chicago and I'm going to show you how to make some fresh pasta and then dry it for future use so for this fresh pasta we have a couple of cups of allpurpose flour a little bit of semolina flour which despite its appearance is not corn meal it's just the hard type of flour three eggs and just a little bit of water all we're going to do is mix this all together and I'm wearing gloves because this can get pretty sticky and I'm going to break three eggs right into the flour then we're going to get our water in there I'm going to pinch these egg yolks because I really want them to break up nicely and just start mixing everything together by hand until this dough forms now a little word of warning this is going to look like something's Terri terribly wrong but I assure you it is not just keep mixing it together and it will all come together nicely all you have to do is get that flour that's coating the liquid mixed in with the liquid from the eggs and from the water and that's going to be your path to success here so keep it working once you get a workable ball of dough turn it right out onto your counter and then we're going to be kneading it by hand okay just bring it all together be sure you're wiping all this excess off your gloves and you can tell why I'm using gloves it's a pretty messy job keep bringing it together like so and all we're going to do now is knead it together until we have a pretty smooth ball of dough we're just looking for all of those white patches of flour to uh work into the liquid kind of use your dough as a as a sponge of sorts to soak up all the flour that's on the table you'll be left with a pretty clean table of course you want to start with a clean table too and that's all we need to do now when we have this very nice smooth ball of dough we're going to take off our gloves and the dough should be really nice and moist but not too moist it should it shouldn't stick to my hands when I'm done with it okay so it's moist not tacky okay so what we're going to do now is cut our ball of dough right in half it's going to make it a little easier to work with and uh you'll see why in just a moment I have a little bit of flour here bench flour just regular all-purpose flour I'm going to put on the table and on top of the dough okay get it nice and smooth now I'm going to use my machine here today A little pasta rolling machine it has a crank that's going to roll two cylinders together those cylinders are going going to make this nice and flat so let's give that a head start and just get it right into the machine now you'll notice as it comes out it's not perfectly uh square or rectangle we want to work on that okay so what we're going to do is fold it over keeping in mind it needs to fit back through here so I fold it over a few times I have nice straight edges being sure to dust it with flower as is needed maybe a little press more and then we'll send it right through again so we have a nice uh straight sided piece of dough okay a little more flour now I'm going to roll it through again and I am on the widest setting here and we're going to go through each setting two times this little Gadget dials it a little bit closer together and we're just going to send it through now as you can see it can become a little tiresome to keep taking it out and putting it back through so what we're going to do stop with an inch or two uh hanging out fold this over and just make a little bit of a loop here that'll make it go a lot smoother for us down to setting two again we're going to roll through each setting two times when we do this we want to be sure that there's plenty of slack on both sides the top and the bottom of the pasta if you don't do that it'll get really quite thin this way so two times per setting and now we're down to number six this machine goes up to number nine so now we're down to number six this machine goes to number nine uh it's important to note that not all machines are the same so your machine might not go up to number nine what's really important here is that you're paying attention to the size of pasta that you want and I'm talking in terms of thickness here so right now we're looking at a pretty nice thin piece of pasta I'm going to go one more setting so this is the setting right before the thinnest one all right and now we've gone through that second to last setting two times it's getting really long so you can kind of see why we're only working with half of the dough take your handy little bench scraper just cut it off right there and roll it through so let's just cut it down into these sheets now if you're going to use this for say lasagna you could just go right ahead and use it right now what we're going to do today is roll this into fetuccini these sheets of pasta you want to make sure there's a little bit of flow in between each layer and that is because you don't want them to stick so once we have that flower down these are delicate sheets uh once we have that flower down we can go ahead and start cutting them okay we have a nice lovely thin pasta I'm going to take my my handle put it right into the fetuccini setting of this pasta cutter get a little bit of flour on either side of the pasta dough and then we're going to send it through just like we did when we're rolling it out I'm going to catch it on this side we have our beautiful nice little bundle of pasta I'm going to toss that with some flour now at this point you could cook it straight away in some boiling water for maybe 3 to 5 minutes till it's nice and Al Dente or if you want to preserve this for future use you can do two things number one you can put it onto a sheet tray just like so in a little bundle fill this up pop it into the freezer let it freeze overnight when it's nice and frozen solid just put it into a Ziploc bag keep it in there don't have to thought it just uh be sure that you uh pop it right into boiling water same cooking time uh from for frozen pasta another way to do this and we'll roll out another sheet another way to do this is to hold your uh strands in a nice uniform layer and just put them onto a normal ordinary hanger spread them out as much as you can you might get a few stragglers that fall off and then hang this up around the house let it dry fully then you can just pop it into a Ziploc bag and keep it that way and there you have it fresh pasta dough preserve it however you like you can freeze it you can dry it again I'm huano with food onthe doo.com [Music]

Channel: cookingguide

Views: 653,287

Keywords: cooking advice, ginger cream scones, freezing pasta, future use, cooking tips, cooking tricks, cooking help, how to cook, cooking preparation, cooking ideas

Id: ZpIBAR_7NRY

Length: 8min 52sec (532 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2012