Learn To Cook: How to Make Fresh Pasta (Homemade Fettuccine)

supermarket dried pasta is made solely from durham flour and water and it's difficult if not impossible to make at home on the other hand fresh pasta made from all-purpose flour and eggs is quite easy to make now the most traditional method to assemble the pasta dough is to start off with a mound of flour right on the countertop then we form a well right in the middle of the mound to hold cracked eggs the two are gently incorporated together and then needed to form a dough now in the test kitchen though we prefer to use a food processor for the job it's much easier and quicker than hand kneading which can take as long as 10 minutes or so and it also provides consistent results now when it comes to rolling out the dough into sheets nothing beats a good old-fashioned hand crank pasta machine now i'm going to show you how to make a batch of fresh fettuccine in this assignment now the only ingredients that you're going to need to make the fresh pasta is flour and eggs now if we were in italy we would use the traditional 0 flour which is dopio or double zero flour but we're not in italy no worries though we found that regular all-purpose flour works fine but don't be tempted to use a higher protein bread flour one might think that it would make for a sturdier pasta and it really does but it's so sturdy that it's tough to work with the dough and it's even tougher to eat so with these two ingredients in hand the key is finding the right ratio and after many tests we found that the best is one large egg to two-thirds cup of all-purpose flour now to extrapolate this into one pound of fresh pasta this means three eggs to two cups of flour so let me show you how to put it all together now we'll start off by adding the flour right into our food processor it all goes in and you'll notice that we're not using any salt at this point because we're going to cook the pasta in salted water which will season it well now just want to put on the lid and give it a pulse or two just to aerate the flour a bit all right so that's it now before we add the eggs to the flour we just want to beat them in a small bowl until they're combined that way they'll incorporate evenly you don't have to go crazy here though all right so now we can go ahead and pour in the eggs there we go put the lid back on and we just want to process the dough until it forms a rough ball and that should only take 30 seconds at the max all right so that'll do it now it's time to look at the dough now if it's come together nicely you can go ahead and just dump it right onto your work surface and be sure to get any small bits of dough left in the work bowl of course you want to be careful of the blade at this point too now if you look in there and you find a bunch of pebbles and it isn't really sticking together it's too dry a couple of small bits are okay at that point you want to add a little bit of water to the food processor about a teaspoon at a time and process it for a second or two now if the dough is sticking to the sides of the work bowl it's too wet and you'll need to add a tablespoon of flour to the machine and process the dough until it comes together all right so that's it for the food processor now we just need to knead this by hand and if we need to just add a little bit of flour here you just want to make the dough nice and smooth and that should only take about a minute or two all right so when the dough looks nice and smooth we just need to let it rest for a few minutes between the moisture and the egg and the processing and the hand kneading we've activated a lot of gluten development in the flour which can make the dough very tough right now it would snap back if we attempted to shape it but after about 15 minutes the gluten strands will relax and be much easier to work with so we'll just go ahead and cover it with a sheet of plastic to keep it from drying out now that the dough is rested and ready we're going to work with more manageable pieces so we'll go ahead and cut the dough into five or six smaller pieces cut it into half and then just cut each half probably three pieces each half there we go total six all right so i'm going to put some of these aside here because we're only going to work with one at a time and we want to keep them covered because they dry out very quickly now to prove that point i'm going to keep this one out uncovered and later on i'll try to roll it through the machine you'll see that it'll crack all right so working one at a time you just want to press a smaller piece into a disk and we're going to start working with our machine now i've set it to the widest setting which is zero usually and we just start to run the pasta through now i'm going to fold this up kind of like a little business letter and just press the seams together this is going to help to even out the sheet of pasta then i want to run it through again still on the widest setting and i'll repeat this again so just bring it up to the center press down and run it through now if at any point feels like your pasta is sticking inside the machine go ahead and coat it with just a little bit of flour so now i'm going to roll this through again i want to smooth out the sheet this is still the widest setting so i'll run it through twice more and it looks like it's sticking just a little bit so just a little bit of flour there and i'll run it through again i haven't changed the setting at all now it starts to look nice and smooth at this point so i'm going to start narrowing the settings here so i'm just going to run it through each time i'm going to narrow the setting we want to work our dough out slowly until it's nice and thin so just run it through keep narrowing the setting it's kind of therapeutic now our goal here is to work the pasta out until it's pretty thin this is very important especially when it comes to filled pasta you don't want where the edges are doubled up with pasta it can be too thick so we're going to continue rolling this out again taking the settings down narrowing them down until it's almost at the final setting on the machine now this may be the last setting it may be the next to last setting in the case of this machine it's seven out of nine which is two settings away from the thinnest setting so i'm just going to run it through once more there we go and you can see how thin the sheet of pasta is actually it should be so thin that you can see your fingers right through the pasta so we know that it's perfect we don't want it to be any thinner it's just going to be too difficult to work with so when the pasta is at the correct thinness you just want to go ahead and lay it right on a kitchen towel go ahead anywhere that it's going to touch itself you might want to add a little bit more flour so it doesn't stick and we want to keep it covered as well with a just damp cloth so i'm going to take another towel just moisten it ever so get out as much of that water as i can and put it right on top of the pasta we don't want too much water here because it will make the pasta gummy okay so that's just about it but to show you how quickly the pasta dough dries out i'm going to attempt to roll that uncovered piece from earlier so let's see it should crack yeah you can start to see how there's dried out bits of dough with the moist dough underneath this is no good you're going to get clumps of thick dough so no good we'll just put that away now once you've rolled out all your dough you can go ahead and use it to make filled pasta like ravioli or for strand pasta you can run it through the machine now we've got a fettuccine attachment here and it cuts the pasta into 3 8 inch wide strands now if you want wider or thinner strands you can always cut them by hand but let me show you how to use the machine first just get one sheet of pasta always keep the rest covered now to make it easier to work with just want to separate it here and if it's sticky go ahead and put a little bit more flour on to make this easier to work with i'm just going to cut it right in half with my bench scraper and now i can run it through the machine let's move the handle here now as i run it through i want to grab the other side because i don't want it to bundle up there we go some beautiful fettuccine strands now i'll go ahead and put it right onto another towel there we go all right so of course you would cut the rest of the pasta the same way now you can use this pasta immediately or if desired you can hold the pasta for several hours just be sure to lay the sheets or strands on a baking sheet if they look like they're getting sticky flour them just a bit and you want to cover them with a damp kitchen towel or plastic wrap to prevent them from drying out

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 1,401,543

Keywords: pasta, fresh pasta, how to, school, cooking, America's Test Kitchen, learn to cook, homemade, DIY

Id: mzQDzYXDD08

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2012