40ish & Beyond Parents

Well, Ray and I tackled making fresh pasta today. We even watched a couple of Youtube videos of people making pasta - each with a slightly different recipe and method...though all quite similar - just minor modifications. We both chose one recipe each to follow with the intention of comparing the two results and seeing which turned out best.

Well, Ray's was definitely the denser of the two...meaning he incorporated more flour (maybe too much?) while mine had too little. I had to add more flour by kneading more in, as it wouldn't work so well to go through the pasta machine (too sticky!).

In the end, while I added more flour, I never felt I got the right consistency. Ray's noodles at least didn't stick together - though we did think that maybe they were just too dry.

Our sons came to dinner and were the unwitting guinea pigs to our homemade pasta meal! We even cooked each of our noodles in separate pots of boiling water to see how each cooked up. In the end, neither were that great...both of our fetuccini-style noodles clumped together in parts in the cooking, although mine had the tendency to clump and stick together even before they were cooked! We had laid them out on tea towels on the dining room table to dry a bit, and it was quite difficult to even lay them out flat and straight! Ideally it would have been nice to have a little wooden pasta drying rack to drape the noodles on to dry. Maybe they wouldn't have clumped together so much that way?

Ray isn't too enthused about attempting a second try at making fresh noodles. (He isn't one to like to cook and create dishes anyway). But I may give it more than another try at this. Surely if I can just get the texture of the dough right, it will all work out.

So that is our fresh pasta making experiment. We wanted to serve fresh homemade pasta to our guests in two weeks' time at a dinner party...We aren't so sure now that we will be successful at making pasta before then! If not...well, there's always store bought fresh pasta to be had.

Anyone ever make fresh pasta before? Care to share?

Shirley

Hey, Sue, thanks for the advice and recipe amounts. I think it would be good to toss the noodles directly into boiling water to cook, but we need to make the noodles in advance. We will either refrigerate them or freeze them to keep them until we need them.

Watching Youtube cooking videos isn't so bad but unfortunately you can't 'feel' how the dough is through a monitor screen... But I'll give another try at making some noodles sometime soon, I think.

Shirley