Homemade Egg Pasta -Tastes of Tuscany Dinner

In keeping with the menu from our recent Tastes of Tuscany dinner, I wanted to share with you the pasta recipe we used to make the ravioli and the fettucine dishes. Nothing compares to tender, silky homemade pasta. These beautiful golden sheets and strands soak up whatever lovely sauce you plan to serve on them.

While store bought, dried pasta is something I use on a regular basis…there is nothing more fun and flavorful than homemade pasta. My husband and I started making homemade pasta over 30 years ago. We received our first Cuisinart food processor as a wedding gift. It came with an actual paper recipe book (remember those)? One of the recipes was for food processor pasta dough. What a game changer it was for making pasta dough and pizza dough. Seriously, it can whiz together the ingredients and form a ball of pasta dough in about 60 seconds…really!

As parents, we started including our kids in the kitchen around age two. We’d pull up a stool to the kitchen sink where Chris and Collin would “wash” fruits and veggies, tear lettuce for salads and just have fun. We wanted them to experience food and food preparation as fun – not a chore to be dreaded. I’m happy to say both of our sons ended up loving food and cooking. In fact our late son, Christopher, worked in the kitchen of a wonderful local restaurant in our small city.

One of our family traditions was to make homemade pizza and/or pasta every Friday night. We taught the boys how to whip up the dough in the food processor, let it rest for at least 30 minutes. After resting, it was time to roll out the pasta and eventually cut the sheets into fettuccine strips.

Back then we used a kitchen counter mounted pasta roller device. They had so much fun cranking the handle to make the machine work. We also used the hand crank roller method during our phenomenal private cooking class in Tuscany.

It wasn’t too long into our pasta making obsession that my carpenter husband put together a handy drying rack. It can hold a surprisingly large amount of pasta. Before he built the rack, we would position two kitchen chairs, back to back, about 5 feet apart. We would take some kitchen twine and secure the string to the backs of the chairs and lay our freshly rolled pasta over the twine – a lot like a outdoor laundry line for clothing. It worked great!

Nowadays I use my Kitchen Aid mixer pasta roller attachment. It speeds up the process of rolling and cutting the pasta dough. The other benefit from the kitchen aid attachment is that it makes it so much easier for me to make pasta by myself. My two hands and the mechanized machine is all I need to crank out beautiful, silky, tender homemade pasta in no time.

I can’t even count the number of times we’ve had friends and family over to the house and taught them how to make homemade pasta. It’s not like I think they’ll all run home and buy the equipment and start making pasta every Friday night (although some have)…but it sure makes for a fun, interactive cooking party. Even the most hesitant cooks can’t resist the fun of getting in there and creating something that the Italians and Chinese have been doing for centuries.

In my many years of making pasta, I have fiddled around with different recipes…some I’ve done just by sight and feel with few measurements. However I recently came upon a video of a woman who specializes in pasta. What I like about her version is after much experimenting, she ended up coming up with exact measurements (by weight) for the perfect egg to flour ratio. Click here to watch her video.

You’ll notice in my recipe that it requires you to weigh the ingredients. This will make it much more likely that your pasta will turn out great. Flour, humidity, size of eggs all impact the final product. So if you don’t have a kitchen scale, I encourage you to invest in one. They don’t cost much and are vital for baking breads and other type of doughs. If you’d rather not go that direction, you can try to use approximate measurements that I have listed in the recipe below.

In the coming days when I share my recipes for ravioli and pasta ragu, I will link you back to this original recipe so you’ll have it for recreating those dishes.

As always I wish you Buon Appetito!