Homemade Fettuccine with Butter-Roasted Tomato Sauce
There is no doubt I love a good kitchen gadget. Just visit my kitchen and pantry and you’ll discover drawers, cabinets and shelving units filled with all kinds of great stuff. It also helps to have an extremely thoughtful and generous husband…who has gifted me with all manner of kitchen gadgets over the past 34 years.
A few weeks ago I mentioned to Alan the idea of getting pasta making attachments for my Kitchen Aid stand mixer. While I have the manual version (the one you fit to the edge of the counter and hand crank), the electric version makes the process super fast and super easy. It’s especially great for when it’s just one person rolling out the dough. So it wasn’t more than a week or two later that my generous husband had one delivered to the house!
We’ve been making homemade pasta since our boys were little. In fact for many years each Friday night we alternated between homemade pizza and homemade pasta. We hold so many sweet memories of the boys making their own little pizzas and using their little boy muscles to hand crank the pasta machine.
As they got older and busier we reserved the homemade pizza or pasta making for special occasions. The most recent memory was during a Thanksgiving gathering I tasked the boys with teaching their cousins how to roll and cut fresh pasta.
If you saw my post from earlier this year, I had a pasta-making pajama party at the house with a few of my girlfriends. It’s always so much fun spending time in the kitchen with people you care about. Cooking with friends and family feeds my soul.
I hope to convince you that making homemade pasta is simple. If you use my method of making pasta dough using a food processor, it will take you between 3 and 5 minutes…TOTAL. So click here and watch a hilarious video of Chef Fabio as he guides you through a tutorial on how to make fresh pasta.
Fresh Pasta requires ONLY 4 INGREDIENTS. TIPO 00 flour, eggs, salt and olive oil. The wine you see is for the chef! You can use all purpose flour…but you should really try 00 for the most tender and silky noodles you’ll ever eat. Order the flour online.
Check out Fabio, a Food Network Top Chef! He’s hilarious. I made my dough exactly as he did…no silly American measuring cups were used…only a large spoon to scoop out flour. Watch the video and this will make sense.
This ball of dough made enough pasta to serve 6 hungry people. Cut it into 4 equal size pieces. Cover it in plastic wrap. Then either start rolling and cutting right away or let it sit on counter for up to an hour or in the refrigerator for up to 6 hours.
The process of using the rolling and cutting attachments is very straight forward. Basically you need to run your sections of dough through the kneading roller several times…decreasing the thickness with each pass. Then you swap out the rolling attachment for the cutting attachment. Click here to learn about how to use them.
The fun part! Running dough through the machine fitted with the fettuccine attachment.
Can you do this without any machines (either manual or electric)? Of course. But that requires loads of hand kneading and then rolling the dough up and cutting into strips. For that I’ll let you do your own online research…this post is to celebrate my wonderful new kitchen gadgets!
All my little bundles of pasta just waiting to be boiled.
Bring a big pot of heavily salted water to a boil…I mean heavily…like a fistful of salt. Then boil your fresh pasta for no more than 1 – 2 minutes! DONE!!!
Of course you need to come up with a sauce to coat these perfectly tender and silky noodles. Tonight I thought I’d try a recipe that popped up on my news feed from Bon Appetit. You cannot go wrong with any of their recipes. They have such high standards and fully research and practice their recipes over and over and over again to assure they’re accurate and produce yummy results. The only modification I made to the recipe I’ll share below is that I poached some shrimp in the pasta water for 2 minutes and then added it to the red sauce when it came out of the oven.
Click here for this unusual and super simple way of making a light red sauce.
The sauce has only 5 ingredients! Tomatoes, garlic, butter, red pepper flakes and anchovies. I used my trusty anchovy paste. When tomatoes are the star ingredient, spring for the more expensive SAN MARZANO. Make sure the can says imported from Italy and certified. Don’t get ripped off by fake brands. You want the ones imported from San Marzano Italy – near Naples.
This is what the sauce looks like before baking it for 40 minutes.
So gather some friends, pour some wine and have some fun making “Buona Pasta”!
