If you've just joined us...
You'll remember that on Monday's blog, I unboxed the Cooks' Emporium Pizza and Pasta Essentials Kit with the idea that I'd employ the tools in the process of making pasta for the family meal on Wednesday...
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TRENT MADE PASTA! And, to be honest, it was easier than I thought it would be!
Here's how it went down...
One of the first instructions in making pasta is to pour the combined flour and salt on to a clean work surface, then make a well in that flour for the combined oil and eggs. This is where we encountered our only major difficulty...
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Talk about "when the levee breaks..." Mindy from Cooks' says some people will use a food processor for this step. Yeah, I can see why.
Not to worry...using my handy bench scraper and even handier hands, I was able to contain the spill and work it all into the beginning of actual pasta dough.
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After kneading for five minutes, using a little more flour to make things a little less sticky...WE HAVE DOUGH!
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I let the dough rest for a bit while I drove my kids...somewhere... then started to roll it out. While the little roller Cooks' gave me certainly made it easy, I can see why people who make their own pasta often actually use a machine to do this. It was a little challenging to get the dough as thin as it probably should have been.
TOP TIP--bench flour is your friend.
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Remember what I said earlier about using a pasta machine to make things a bit easier? That also holds for cutting the dough into actual noodles. Let's just say the hand cutter I used made my pasta a little...freeform...
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It's a whole rack of artistically cut pasta! I actually got two racks of pasta, and they both looked like this...
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TIME TO BOIL THE PASTA!
What's cool? Fresh pasta takes about a third of the time to cook than does dried pasta...
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The finished product. My people call it...shrimp scampi...
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As you can see, the finished pasta is a little thicker and wider than "factory" fettuccini, but it sure was tasty. And, like I said at the outset--it really was easier than I thought it would be. I'm looking forward to doing it again...and finding someone with a pasta machine.