> 4. The secret is to weigh the eggs and adjust everything using that measurement.
This implies that only egg-based pasta can be made at home, which is not the case.
> 5. The "volcano" honestly makes no sense. Just use a bowl and the right proportions.
In my experience, the "volcano" (mixing on a countertop) is no harder than using a bowl, and doesn't get a bowl dirty. I'm going to immediately need to get the countertop dirty when kneading the pasta anyway.
> 8. If you have a system for drying, then it becomes much easier to make more.
Depending on your local climate, a drying system can be as simple as some trays and enough space to leave them out for a day or two.
I usually just use flour and water. Sometimes I add some salt. As far as I understand, this is very common, though perhaps less common for homemade styles of pasta.
Haha I hear you but the intention was more to say something for example if your egg content weighs 45g then you use 90g flour, rather than 1 egg to 100g flour. The difference ends up being significant.
The reason for the volcano is you can mix the flour in a little at a time and watch it until it hits the right consistency. That's not very relevant if you're using Gold Medal AP or some flour that's made in a high volume factory, they've got lab equipment to make sure their flours are consistent. (Once you get a really good feel for it, you also may notice differences depending on things like humidity.) If you're getting artisan flour, it's more relevant. I suppose you can still do this in a large enough bowl too, but you're going to turn it out onto your counter anyway to knead or roll or whatever, so the bowl is just dirtying another dish.
It probably does minimize the amount of flour on your shirt and floor after. And you've probably got a dishwasher. So do whatever makes you happy, but I like the volcano.
It’s not difficult just messy add extra time for cleanup. It’s also generally not a good use of time, fresh pasta can be bought at the farmers market or organic grocery store for 3-6$ and tastes the same so it are paying yourself 12$ an hour to make this. It’s fun once but generally not worth doing
You can get 00 durum, if reading between the lines your recommendation is actually to use durum flour not softer wheat? Indeed 00 is often sold in the UK as 'pasta flour' and is durum wheat (or at least a mix) milled to that fineness; semolina implies durum wheat but is typically coarser (even 'fine' semolina, I don't know what number grade, other than 00 we don't use it here) - maybe that's not the case in Italy and '00' is never durum but 'semolina' can be that fine?
Even faster, with practice, you can form the pasta directly with your hands and nothing more than a single tool like a metal rod or a wide flat knife. https://youtu.be/-vloWCEmbXI?si=dH_QYzJLaQ5pGjEG
Looking at all the comments here, I’d like to add that fresh made pasta has eggs and is more suited to ravioli and bolognese. You can’t make homemade pasta that will come out al dente. You could substitute water for eggs in the dough but you’ll have to dry it in a controlled environment which is beyond the scope of home made pasta. “Alex French guy cooking” did a whole pasta series and concluded that homemade pasta won’t compete with quality Italian store bought pasta. If you want that perfect al dente bite, you are better off visiting your local Italian import store and picking up pasta that requires longer cooking durations. Besides consider the health implications - do you really want carbonara which is basically eggs with fresh egg pasta ?
Yeah I did this for a while and went back to store bought pasta. I just don’t have the time. It’s definitely more delicious but at 4x-8x the time cost.
Not saying it is you but most people saying they don't have the time also spend hours watching stuff on streaming.
This is definitely the kind of stuff you can do while listening to a podcast, watching a show. Additionally cooking in general is an activity I actually like to do. Give me good music, a nice bottle of wine and I can spend a lot of time in my kitchen.
Activity-hours aren't fungible and have constraints. If I need to eat by 6pm and get home from work at 5:30 pm, I generally can't just choose to swap a 9 - 10 pm hour of streaming with an hour of preparing food.
While some people can level up and perform food-prep activities during the 9-10 pm hour so that the following 5:30 - 6 pm slot can be filled with quick prep, many people don't know how to do so, nor see the ROI for such activity.
I am not saying you have to do fresh pasta every day (nor should you eat pasta every day!). I like to do it, same as bread and other things, but I obviously don't always do everything.
But parts of the pleasure of many things comes from both the anticipation and the satisfaction of making something good and taking the time to cook is part of it. Which sometimes involves organizing your day so that you can do it.
>It’s definitely more delicious but at 4x-8x the time cost.
Fresh pasta freezes pretty well, you can easily do a month at a time.
But sure, if time is of the essence, can't compete with opening a box. However, I'm not even sure they should be considered the same food; fresh pasta can be (should be?) eaten hardly cooked, with a bit of seasoning and oil.
A few things you're missing. You're making a batch in your kitchen. They're making a significantly higher volume through an industrialized process. You probably throw things in a ziplock bag, then into the freezer. They need to think of actually packaging a product. You can source the highest ingredients you can, as you only need a little. They need to be able to source ingredients at a volume that can satisfy production and at a cost that makes the item profitable. You don't really worry about how long it'll last because you plan to use it in a month or two. They need to ensure the product stays fresh during storage, on the shelves, and in your fridge/freezer for longer than you expect.
Each of these components requires compromises in a way that the home cook doesn't need to worry about. These are the things that cause compromise in quality, the addition of ingredients you'd never add yourself, and a lack of freshness that's apparent to anyone who makes their own versions from scratch. The best you can do is buy items from small, local, specialty shops, but it will be much more costly and just about anything you find in your average grocery store isn't going to be produced at that scale at all.
> You can source the highest ingredients you can, as you only need a little. They need to be able to source ingredients at a volume that can satisfy production and at a cost that makes the item profitable.
100%. This is always the epitome of French cooking, to me.
France: No good X at the market this week? I won't make X dish.
America: We have X on the menu, so we must be able to make it every week.
I think the assumption is that mass-produced frozen isn't using the best ingredients.
I know when I made refrigerated yoghurt (so only milk+culture ingredients) I could taste the difference in the milk freshness, and I was just using gallon store milk.
Freezer section has generally been where cheap or low-quality ingredients get a logo and heart-warming story about Nana slapped on them.
And to some degree it's a lemon market: I can only see the logo, the story, and the price, not what went into production. So high-quality ingredients have little pricing power.
I don't understand it either. Buying fresh from a local store and freezing is also easy. But I can never find a product of that quality that already comes frozen.
How about store-bought "fresh" pasta? In France there are a bunch of brands selling these. You have to keep them refrigerated even before opening, the expiration date is usually not too far off in the future, and once you open the pack you have to eat them in a couple days.
Outside of restaurants pretending to do fresh pasta, I've never had actually fresh pasta, but some of these store-bought ones are very good, at least as far as my palate is concerned.
> It’s definitely more delicious but at 4x-8x the time cost
I guess I'm the only one who doesn't feel like it's tangibly better than dry pasta. I've made my own, bought from some of the best Italian pasta makers in Brooklyn ... I just can't tell.
Ignorance is bliss… live your life happy that any pasta will do for you. I can tell the difference but I choose not to really care as the time sink isn’t worth it to me. I envy you though. Not being able to tell a difference isn’t a weakness, sometimes it’s a strength.
Can somebody share (potentially adjusting for IKEA effect) if homemade pasta really tastes better than pre-made one? Barilla? De Secco? Artisan brands?
I will give you a different answer than what I see others saying:
Good noodles are good. You can buy good noodles. If you can tell the difference between De Cecco and Barilla spaghetti noodles then you could easily discern homemade pasta.
If "they all taste the same" then the texture difference is likely not enough to make it appreciable.
I dont even make sauce anymore I just buy a jar of Raos.
Its funny how we compliment a commercial endeavor as "this tastes homemade" and a home cook as "better than what you can buy".
IMO it does not, but maybe I’m just making it wrong.. It’s notable that places like French Laundry explicitly dry their home made pasta before cooking with it, IMO the al-dente texture is way better in dried pasta than freshly made.
I guess it’s subjective ofc, but making pasta is a whole thing, hours of work, massive mess to clean up, for an end result that has worse texture than a high end dried pasta
French cooking YouTuber, Alex, has a series [1] where he goes deep on this topic. If anyone is interested in the intricacies of why high end dried pasta is so special and hard to replicate, I'd highly recommend checking his series out.
Everything takes a long time when you have no experience. Once you have a recipe and process, making pasta is actually pretty easy. Not something you're going to do after a long day of work, necessarily, but certainly not hours of work.
I don't know how you're making pasta, but it it doesn't have take this long, and there's certainly not a lot of mess (one bowl and one surface the size of a cutting board to clean)...
If you've got a cookbook and you're trying to make fiddly shapes or pasta in quantities like they do in fancy restaurants like French Laundry, OK, I can see how that may take hours, and maybe that's the problem, but if you're just making orecchiette or cavatelli for your family, it's not going to take long at all.
You’re probably not kneading enough. Or not resting long enough at the end. Recipes I’ve seen from Thomas Keller don’t involve dying but I’ve not seen them all I’m sure.
It doesn’t take hours of active time, just 15 minutes, and even if you don’t rest it at the end it should still be better than store bought.
I like it too, but there's no denying that it's more of a production than you're suggesting. You need a clean place to knead the dough (so first clean the counter), you need to flour the dough as you're kneading and then putting it through the KitchenAid rollers so flour gets on the counter and floor, you need a cutting board to cut the pasta if you're not using the machine cutters (which I agree are superfluous), you need a tray on which to put the cut pasta after cutting and before cooking.
Then you need to clean up the mixer, pasta rollers, counter, floor, cutting board, knife and resting tray. Maybe you can minimize all this by the generous use of plastic wrap or something, but 15 minutes would be a reach goal for me.
I like to cook a lot so my counter is already clean, but I've got a silicone mat that goes in the dishwasher I use for pie crusts and pasta. Everything else goes in the dishwasher. I do the mixing in a bowl. I sweep after every time I cook anyway, but I rarely end up with much flour on the floor.
I've worked in food service off and on for 30 years now (got my first job when I was in 13, was a meat cutter at 20, now own catering and packaged food companies) so my kitchen habits are probably not that of the average person.
> you need to flour the dough as you're kneading and then putting it through the KitchenAid rollers so flour gets on the counter and floor,
I found out that using semolina can almost negate the usage of additional flour on the counter, the roller and on the cut pasta (I still put some because I think it adds a little bit of texture to the dough). I have a ratio of 1 part semolina to 2 parts of regular flour, and 1 egg per 100g dry ingredients. Cleaning up afterwards is just a super quick sweep with the broom and dustpan.
It's simply not the same thing. The dried pasta you buy is extruded under high pressure. Typically you use a good quality semolina and water for this instead of type 0 flour and eggs.
Hand kneading and rolling your pasta produces a very different texture from extruded pasta. Even if you use semolina and water and hand roll it, the result just isn't the same. It's actually very hard to reproduce some of the pre-packaged pastas in terms of texture without the right equipment. Forget about doing that at home; you need some industrial equipment to do that well.
Homemade spatzle and gnocchi have noticeably different textures. Store boughten spatzle is harder and drier while homemade is softer and more moist. Store boughten gnocchi is grainier and can't be as soft as homemade without making it soggy. That's my experience. I can't speak to homemade egg noodles.
Supermarket gnocchi may as well go by a different name, if you have it in a proper restaurant or make it at home it's just completely different - and make it at home and you'll realise that you cannot just vacuum seal it and keep it refrigerated for a few months; there really is something quite different going on.
Dry and fresh have a different texture to the mouth to begin with and fresh ones are cooked in 2-3 minutes instead of 6 to 15 minutes for dried ones.
Now between homemade fresh pasta and industrial fresh pasta yes I find a difference but mostly in texture. Between my homemade pasta and homemade pasta from the local italian grocery it is mostly a matter of taste (amount of salt, using eggs or only water, etc).
I rarely do homemade dry pasta because it involves a lot of space.
It depends a lot on how you make it. First thing, as others have already mentioned, it is fresh pasta, not dry pasta, these two are different things. Different ingredients, different preparation and of course, different taste.
You effectively can't make dry pasta at home, it requires specialized and rather expensive equipment. Stay with a good store-bought brand, DeSecco is fine and Barilla has a huge lineup of varying levels of quality. I like the "trafilata al bronzo" kind, they have a rougher texture which is better for making sauces. Artisan pasta may not be worth the price.
For fresh pasta, you can also buy in stores, but these are worth making yourself. When making them yourself, you can select your flour, your recipe, you can also put other ingredients than the basics if you want, say, green pasta. Depending on your machine, you can make the shape or thickness you want. You can even also make ramen-style (alkaline) pasta, with kansui. It may not taste objectively better, if there is such a thing, but it may very much taste better to you.
Also, I like to cook my homemade pasta immediately after making them. The dough can sit for a while, but after that, it goes straight from the machine to the pot, one portion at a time. I use a strainer like they have in ramen shops, so I can reuse the water between portions. Usually, when one portion have finished cooking (it only takes about 3 minutes), the other is ready. This way, they are less likely to stick, even without flour or corn starch. Obviously, it doesn't scale, and you can't do that with store bought pasta.
BTW, I use rollers, not an extruder. The rollers are a bit more labor intensive, but I prefer it over an extruder, it also tends to be cheaper. But this is a personal preference, the end product is simply different.
There is a big difference in texture. Homemade pasta is a lot chewier, which I really like.
Edit: I see other commenters say it is a lot of work and really messy. In my experience, it doesn't have to be. The first few times I tried I made a big mess, but after just a few times I got both faster and less messy.
Homemade pasta tastes better than the 99 cents per pound stuff you see at the super market. I don't know what "artisan" brands are, but as a baseline, check out pasta di gragnano (IGP). With minimal effort, ingredients (flour + water and/or eggs) and no special equipment, you can match the quality of this at home, for sure. Although, it's worth noting that fresh and dried pasta taste different. I think most people would prefer fresh pasta, but it is way more expensive to buy, if you can even find it at your super market.
After that, you can get into special flours, paying super close attention to hydration, simple or complex tools that make shapes easier, dehydrators to dry and store your pasta, and really hone the craft.
It depends on the recipe. When I make homemade pasta, I use high-protein flour and a recipe that will use more eggs than usual - so the texture is noticeably more "al dente" than store bought pasta.
Fresh versus dry is the biggest distinction to me.
I do notice some improvement in the $5 vs $2 dry pasta brands and usually make that indulgence. Anything priced higher I’ve not noticed enough difference to make it worth it. Also, not sure if this is super wide spread but, my grocer carries frozen fresh pasta which is a bit pricy IMO but makes sense in some occasions.
Even though I think fresh is top notch, I most likely won’t go through the time investment to DIY it. For me, when I’m in that type of mood it’s time to visit an Italian restaurant that makes fresh pasta
it depends on your taste, usually home made pasta is not dry pasta and it's made with eggs, so actually not the same thing. I wouldn't recommend Barilla anyway, it's just average, there are much tastier brands.
I've read someone here lamenting the cost of the machines to make fresh pasta, you don't need any, just your hands, elbow grease a rolling pin and a good knife to cut it.
If you wanna skip the rolling pin phase, which is the most difficult one, and don't make huge amount of pasta, you can buy one of these.
Fresh pasta is an entirely different beast from dried pasta, so the two are hard to compare. I never made dried pasta at home, but I find it impossible (even in Italy) to buy fresh gnocchi that are as good as the ones that you can make at home.
It tastes different if only because homemade pasta includes eggs. Industrial pasta can get away with not using eggs because machines can exert a lot more pressure than your hand and extrude it cleanly.
Just make it a few times and see for yourself. It's very very easy to do and doesn't require any special ingredients or tools. Flour (any type!), eggs (optional), water, rolling pin, knife.
its not really about taste, its about texture. imho lasagna with homemade pasta lets you make lots of thinner layers instead of using the thick noodles from the store. it makes the end product much different.
Wouldn't do it without a pasta machine attachment to my mixer, though. I'm lazy.
I am not sure how you made pasta but I don't see where is the huge effort? Basically it is a dought that you just roll several times? Are you one of those people from the Wall-E movie that can't seem get out of their hovering couch?
You don't need an expensive machine to make pasta either if you stick to lasagne, raviolis and the long ones such as papardelle, tagliatelle, taglionis y spaghettis. Mine costed me 20€
As for the huge mess, it is just flour that you mostly dust off from your table in your hand and sweep from the floor.
There's a common misconception that fresh pasta is always better over store bought.
In fact, there are two different kinds of pasta here fresh (egg based) and dried (semolina based) pasta.
Egg pasta can easily be made at home, without even the need for any machines.
Dried pasta requires industrial heavy duty machinery due to the force required to shape the pasta.
It's also important to note that not all sauces pair well with fresh pasta and same goes for dried.
Nowadays I'm careful when picking dried pasta from the supermarket. I have learnt that the more yellow the colour, and the smoother the texture, the lower the overall quality will be of the pasta.
Looking for these key indicators will give you pasta with better texture and pasta water to use for your sauces.
I'm a bit rusty now, but I used to make a lot of pasta and enjoyed teaching friends the wonders of making pasta. There's a learning curve as many other commenters mentioned, but once they "get it" it's magical.
I would organize parties where everyone would bring different ingredients and we'd make ravioli from the food we had. With noodles, some guests wouldn't understand why make the effort. But with custom ravioli, they would immediately understand it.
Learning to make homemade pasta is an investment that pays dividends. It’s like a piecrust; the first few times you do it, it seems overly difficult, and you’ll wonder why you didn’t just spend $3 at the store, but then once you get the hang of it, you can do it in your sleep. You’ll wonder how you ever thought it was hard at all. And you realize how much better it is.
I no longer buy noodles unless I want a shape I can’t cut.
My best advice: get a motorized roller if you don’t have a helper or a functioning third arm because you kinda need two hands to guide and retrieve the pasta. I like the roller that goes in my kitchenaid. I don’t love the extruder, the pasta has to be wetter and the final results aren’t as good. This recipe would just jam it since he’s using a low ratio of flour to egg of 3:2.
That one's meant for all-semolina pasta. Just get the semolina wet enough to form into a ball and send it through. It's best to let it dry completely so you can come close to replicating store-bought pasta and cook it al dente.
I went on and egg noodle and ramen noodle quest last year. I used just all purpose flour and made sodium carbonate from baking soda, and was very happy with the results for the most part. I feel a pasta roller is both more fun and necessary for a good product, as is weighing all ingredients. I also tried to make fresh Chinese egg noodles which, if you've bought them from a factory, have a certain texture and smell. I didn't have a recipe and my experiments got close, but never on the dot. Still ended up with a freezer packed with deliciousness for many months.
Something people should understand about pasta is there are two types: "fresh" egg pasta and macaroni pasta. You can make the former at home but you can't really make the latter. The latter are made with special bronze dies and big industrial machines. Macaroni pasta is always dried, but you can dry "fresh" pasta too.
Fresh pasta and macaroni pasta are both good for different things. One doesn't replace the other.
You can make it at home. It’s a matter of equipment. If you have a kitchen aid mixer, you can mix the dough then use attachments to roll, slice, and/or extrude it.
The extruder and dye add a lot to end product and you may still be better off buying the dry pasta but it can be done.
For anyone that thinks the investment is too high, you’re not wrong. But I’m a proverbial middle aged dude that “has everything”, so when birthdays and holidays come around I put expensive esoteric kitchen gadgets on my wishlists (tools in general also).
I'm quite surprised about the amount of comments here about 'fresh home made pasta = eggs'
You can make fresh and home made without eggs, see udon for example. I use this recipe for years and it's always perfect + you can freeze it for later use https://www.justonecookbook.com/udon-noodles/
In my experience, homemade noodles will absorb sauce much better than the store-bought version. And, with a good sauce, the result is just _so much better_. You won't find me making my own noodles if they're going to be paired with Ragu, though.
Here's what is unsolved for me: store-bought garlic bread in foil to heat in the oven, or roll-my-own garlic butter and bread?
I tried the egg pasta thing with the kitchen aid roller attachment. Good results, but not worth the effort in the least bit and I really enjoy the process of cooking usually.
Then I tried making the biang biang noodles that Ethan C demonstrated on YouTube. 50% hydration flour water and salt. No special tools or extra ingredients. The simplicity and good taste converted us over.
You can buy 300G of fresh made-in-Italy egg pasta from a big supermarket for £1.35 (£4.50/KG), and it's not bad. A good middle ground! (£0.50/KG more than De Cecco dried)
1. Fresh pasta and dry pasta are apples to oranges.
2. Making fresh pasta for 2 people is easy (about 30 min from nothing to cooked).
3. For more people than that, either be prepared for much more work, or make lasagna.
4. The secret is to weigh the eggs and adjust everything using that measurement.
5. The "volcano" honestly makes no sense. Just use a bowl and the right proportions. (edit: mix and knead in the bowl)
6. 50g egg + 100g processed flour (i.e. '00' in Italy, not sure other countries)
7. You can add 'semola' (also called 'semolina'), 50g egg + 80/20 (flour/semola).
8. If you have a system for drying, then it becomes much easier to make more. (edit: system != commercial machine, just some plan, e.g. a countertop)
9. Otherwise, the best way is to just make it and cook it immediately.
10. For dry pasta, buy it. If the color is white it's high quality, yellow is low.
Feel free to ask any questions