(upbeat Music) - Hey, I'm Ben, one of the
chefs from Sorted Food. And today, I'm gonna show
you one of those basic skills that becomes the bedrock
of so many dishes. I'm gonna show you two
different variations. You guys have been asking for it loads. It's been searched for
loads, it's homemade pasta, and it really only
involves two ingredients. Right. I'm here with Mike. Who's going to keep me on
track and make sure I don't get too cheffy, but why want to get
across here is the fact that as chefs, sometimes
recipes are really useful. Often it's easier just
to remember the basics and then feel free to ad lib. So the basics to pasta is for
every portion you're making 100 grammes of flour and one egg. That's it. So today we'll make the pasta dough the same pasta dough, but then we'll divide in two, we'll do two different things with it. One we'll roll out, cut and
we'll get nice strands of pasta. Tagliatelle or pappardelle. You choose. The other version will be a filled pasta, So we'll fill it with a very
simple filling and show you exactly how to make ravioli or tortellini. First things first. Enough pasta for you and I, Mike, so that's two people,
200 grammes of flour, season it with salt. 200 grammes equals two eggs. Now the brave professional
chefs out there, we'll just do this on the
table. They'll make a well, they put the eggs in the middle,
start to bring it together. Fine. You can do that. If you're at home, this is
much cleaner, much easier. I'm also going to add in a glug of oil, about a teaspoon per egg, and then just bring it
together into a dough. Generally speaking, I like
to mix it in the middle and occasionally sort of
just bring in a bit more. Once it's almost together, you can get your hands involved. Once it starts to come together, it kind of sticks to all those
little bits in the bowl and the bowl ends up practically clean, and then you just need to knead it until it's really soft and elastic. I mean, this is already
coming together nicely, but just needs a bit of work. Happy with that. You can give it a poke. You can see what we mean.
It's like, Play-Doh. You want to wrap it in
cling film and then let it rest in the fridge. Or actually even just at room
temperature for half an hour. Now, while we wait for our pasta to rest, you want about half an hour, but actually can be anything
up to a day in the fridge. If you want to get ahead, we can make a filling for our
filled pasta and get a large pan of water up to a rapid boil cause we need that later on. The filling today is gonna
be based around cream cheese. You can add to the cream cheese, whatever you've got in the fridge. Today, we're going to super classic. I've got some fresh spinach. All I've done is wilt it by pouring boiling water over
the spinach... a few seconds, and then squeezing out
most of the moisture. - Best to sort of wait for
the water to cool a bit before you squeeze the spinach. - Yes squeeze with tongs,
get it on some kitchen roll. And when it's cool enough
squeeze or take out the tongs and put it into cold water. So
you maybe stop the cooking. So it stays really green. And then it be cool
enough to just squeeze. Spinach, lemon and nutmeg, probably only quarter of a teaspoon. Once it's been freshly grated with plenty of salt and pepper, I would also say, this is quite a lot that
I've made for filled pasta, that we're going to demonstrate today, but it's also delicious with other pasta. You don't have to fill it cause if you put that into hot pasta, like tagliatelle with
some of the pasta water to let it down, you get an amazing creamy
sauce to go around pasta. If you can't be bothered to fill it. - Oh, he's in his herb box. - So the filling is done for
one of our pastas for the other one, super simple lemon,
garlic, fresh herbs. So a clove of garlic cutting
two wafer thin slivers. Remember your knife technique, keep your fingers back and just warm up in olive oil in a pan. You don't really want to fry it and make it go golden and crisp. You're just infusing it and
we'll chop the herbs. Perhaps a bit spoiled for choice.
I've got fresh oregano, fresh basil and fresh thyme, but you use whatever you've got. You can chop some spinach.
You could chop some rocket, right? pasta's rested. I'm going to take half of it and roll it out nice and thin on a floured surface. Not too much flour.
Remember you've already done your recipe and your ratio of a hundred grammes to one egg. You don't want to add too
much more flour to your board, but if it's a bit sticky,
of course you'll have to. Then you want to basically
get it super thin. Pretty much, the thinner the better and the cutting by hand
is also really easy. You want to fold it over on itself. So you get many layers
thick and then cut it. The risk of doing that is
that all the layers stick together. So little sprinkling of
semolina stops those layers from sticking, but also won't make it claggy when you later boil it. Depending how fancy you want to be...
at home... I use it all, but these end bits, aren't going to be straight and perfect. So you basically cut them off, but they are, what's I'd call, pasta scraps they are also great to throw into
soups and broths and things just cook out and add, but now you've got a straight edge. We can cut pasta. If we'd done it well enough, you should have these lovely
long strands of pasta. Now, a couple of options. If you're making homemade pasta, these are ready to go
straight into your water, or you can hang them over a
coat hanger and dry them out. 24 hours at room temperature and you'll have yourself dried pasta. So that was about the hundred grammes bout the one egg about so about half a batter made basically sort of like a handful of pasta is a good generous portion. And
then you just want to lower it into rapidly boiling, heavily salted water. You want to try and bring it
back to boil as soon as it can so that you've got your
oil and your garlic squeezing lemon juice loads of those fresh herbs we cut up. Fresh pasta, no time at all. You want it 'al dente' which actually means to the tooth, a slight bite basically when it's all floating and then just like gorgeous and fused lemon and garlic and herb oil with a tablespoon or two of that
hot, starchy, pasta water. - So the starchy pasta water, basically just thickens it up a bit. - It emulsifies it, it thickens. It it's almost like the glue, but it's also put the seasoning 'cause that was seasoned water. - Ahh - And I hope it really is easy to follow a hundred grammes of pasta flour, one egg pinch of salt, a
little bit of olive oil Knead it until it's like play- doh rest it, roll it, cut it, boil it. Yummy. Easy right? And you can cut the pasta
into thinner strands, fatter sheets, and you can mix in any herbs or flavours you like. A little kick of
chili is really nice too. However, same dough can also be used for filled pasta. Exactly the same. You're going to want a floured surface, not floured too much. Roll out as thin as you can. And I really mean thin this
time because to fill a pasta, you need pasta on both
sides of your filling. So it's going to end up double thickness. And for this one. I'm going even longer and thinner because if we're going to fill it, then you got two options. You either roll two sheets, put your filling on one and put the other sheet on top or what I find a lot easier to just roll one, put the thing on one age
and just flop it over. So I'm going for the flop technique. Teaspoon blobs. Oh no. - What? - I started at the top off for that and I've ended up at the bottom Look at that! What a mess. So top tip for everyone at home, you want to put your filling
just above the centre line or just below the centre line, not half and half. Right. Water acts as glue. Fold it over. what you want to do is
use the cups of your hand, just to kind of seal
in around that filling. If you got one of these,
you're probably quite fancy. If you've got one of these probably means you eat pizza more often. If not, you probably got one of these. Any of those work, what you want to do is
cut either side of it. Exactly the same as the other pasta into rapidly boiling heavily salted water. About two minutes until
they float. Just a little bit of sauce for base the plate. There's 101 ways to make
filled and shaped pasta. This is pretty much a
foolproof, fail-safe way. You can mix up the flavours. Obviously. You can mix up the shapes. Obviously. You can put in
more filling, less filling You do you. There you go, it looks quite fancy, but let's be honest. Same easy pasta may be an extra step when
it comes to doing the filling rather than just. cutting the pasta. If I was at home... I'd bung the other three on! But there we go. I appreciate you're not going to make homemade pasta at home
all the time. I don't. But when you do it is exceptional. Whether you toss it through things, fill it with things you
guys can create. I said, this was just the
foundation and the basis. So, you know, we liked
to talk and share ideas, comment down below. What do you like to serve
with your pasta in it, on it in between it, you tell us and as ever joined
the conversation over on Twitter. So this pretty much wraps
up our September skills mini series. Tell us what you thought. Did you enjoy it? Did you use a skill? Did you like a skill? Don't forget head over to
sorted.club where there's loads of other blogs and skills you can pick up. And if enough of you give this video like, we'll know to make some more. Can we eat pasta now? - Oh yes, please. Oh my goodness. That is fantastic. - Garlicky, Herby. - Mmm. But lemony. - Mhmm. - Oh, I've got to try that.
