The Mixing Mistake You Can Easily Fix When Making Pasta From Scratch

Across pasta recipes, homemade noodles, whether for spaghetti with pesto or a Rome-inspired cacio e pepe, tend to outshine their boxed counterparts, resulting in a fresher and more flavorful pasta dish. And luckily for the casual cook, fresh pasta recipes come simple, most calling for nothing more than flour, eggs, and, occasionally, water. However, you can run into trouble at the mixing stage for this homemade dough.

Many pasta recipes suggest forming this dough by starting with a well of flour. Press down at the center of the flour, and crack your eggs directly into the hole. From there, you can begin to bring the mixture together. But often, raw eggs prove finicky, dripping through your flour barricade and slipping away from your dough. Luckily, this error is as easy to fix as it is to make. All you have to do to bring your dough together is add more flour.

To fix this mixing problem, simply recreate the wall between your flour and your eggs, and your dough will be as good as new. As for how, exactly, to fix the gap between your flour and your eggs? Your hands should do the trick, but you could also use a scraper to push the eggs back into the well. Employing a bench scraper is especially useful if you'd rather keep your hands clean; pasta doughs, especially those you have yet to fully knead, can prove sticky. However, so long as you have some flour — and your hands — you'll be able to salvage any and all pasta dough.

Just make sure not to go overboard with your patched wall of flour. Adding more flour to pasta dough is a delicate act, so it's best to add flour gradually and on an as-needed basis. If you add too much flour — even to protect your eggs — you'll make your dough overly dry and crumbly. Alternatively, you can start your pasta dough with a little less flour than the recipe calls for and work your way up from there.

Luckily, pasta dough is a forgiving recipe, so you can overcome too much flour with an easy addition of water. Simply add a spoonful of water, and you'll soften your pasta mixture into an ideal consistency.