Make Homemade Pasta Like The Pros With A Fun Flour Volcano

While the boxed stuff certainly does the job well, nothing can beat homemade pasta. Fresh pasta has a tenderness that can't be rivaled, tastes richer, and cooks in the blink of an eye. Also, the fresh strands have more starch than their dried equivalent; this comes in handy when you're making a sauce that needs to be thickened. Believe it or not, you don't have to be at a trattoria in Italy to savor fresh pasta. With only two ingredients and a few simple kitchen tools, you can make homemade pasta. The technique is the best part; shape your flour into a volcano and crack your eggs into the center of it.

From there, use a fork to scramble the eggs at the "summit" of the volcano, and then use the fork to incorporate the flour into the eggs from the center of the volcano outward. Once you've formed something close to a dough, knead it by hand for a few minutes until you have a smooth ball. Let it rest for a bit before rolling it out and creating whatever pasta shapes your heart desires.

Because there are only two ingredients in freshly made pasta, their quality is what will make or break the finished product. You want to reach for semolina or 00 flour or buy local flour for the best homemade pasta. Using these higher-quality flours rather than all-purpose will give your noodles the desired flavor and texture.

If you roll out your dough after it rests and it ends up feeling more sticky than smooth, don't panic. You can fix homemade pasta dough that's too soft by rolling it into sheets and letting it partially dry on a drying rack before you cut it into shapes. For this, a bamboo pasta drying rack with multiple bars will come in handy, so you can dry multiple sheets at once. Some of the easiest shapes to make are fettuccine (just cut the sheets into thin strips) and other long, flat noodles, as well as bowtie or spiral-shaped pasta.