Pasta – Try It Homemade

Sure, it’s easy to boil some water and open up a box of pasta, but is it fun?  Homemade pasta is rustic, delicious, and a lot of fun to make.  You will be surprised at how good homemade pasta tastes, and if your kids did the cooking, the meal will be gone in minutes.

It takes just a few ingredients to make homemade pasta, but it does take some time.  The dough needs to rest during the process, so your kids will want to start making the pasta about 2 hours before you will want to eat.  The homemade pasta can also be made in advance, and boiled within a couple of days.

Traditionally, homemade pasta is just made with flour and water.  Optional ingredients are olive oil and salt.  Here’s our recipe:

• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tsp olive oil

These four ingredients combine into a delicious plate of pasta!

Yes, that’s it!  Nothing fancy here!  This makes enough pasta for 4 people.

Next, comes the fun!  Or I could say, mess!  The dough can be mixed together in a bowl, but we do everything on the counter top.  The messier, the better!  The mess starts with dumping the flour onto the counter and making a well in the center of the pile.

Make a well in the center of the flour.

Then crack 2 eggs into the center of the well.

Add the eggs to the flour.

Add the olive oil and the salt to the eggs.  Then, using a fork, start to beat the eggs while incorporating a little bit of the flour at a time.  Keep mixing the ingredients together until the dough starts to form a ball.

This is where it starts to get messy…

Once the dough forms into a ball, add a light layer of flour to the countertop and knead the dough for about a minute.  Then cover the dough ball with plastic wrap or a towel and let it rest for about 10 minutes.

After the dough rests, gather up all of the kids because it’s time to start kneading the dough.  The dough needs to be kneaded for 6 – 8 minutes.

I hate kneading dough, but she doesn’t! Yes!

It should look like this when you are done.  It will feel smooth and not tacky.

Smooth pasta dough…

Cover the dough and let it rest for 30 minutes.  This will allow you to roll it out much easier.  Time for the kids to clean up all the flour that is likely to be everywhere.

When it’s time for rolling out the dough, lightly flour the surface, and start rolling.  The homemade pasta dough needs to be very thin.  This dough ball should roll out into a 18-20 inch circle.  You can also use a pasta machine to get your thin sheets of pasta.

The pasta needs to be thin, almost to the point that you can see through it.

Let the rolled out dough rest for 10 minutes, so it can start to dry out.  Then it’s time to cut the pasta.  We use a pizza cutter with a plastic blade and cut thin strips of dough.  For some reason, the kids love to eat the scraps.  Eww.

Cutting the dough and saving some scraps to play with.

The strips of pasta need to dry before cooking.  They should dry for 30 minutes or so.  If you are going to boil the pasta another night, let the pasta dry completely before storing.

It’s not pretty, but it sure tastes good!

Put on a large pot of water to boil.  Once it’s boiling, add about 2 tablespoons of salt and the pasta.  Homemade pasta only takes a couple of minutes to boil.  Stir the pasta, and once it floats, taste it to see if it’s done.  When it’s cooked to your liking, drain the noodles and serve.

Homemade noodles taste amazing with just a little bit of butter, pepper, and parmesan.  Or top them with your favorite sauce.  You will have some proud kids who can now say they’ve made homemade pasta!

Homemade pasta with meat sauce.

Homemade Pasta