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How to make pasta without a pasta machine
Making pasta at home is easier and cheaper than you may think. In this post I’ll share my method and thoughts on homemade pasta, and how to make pasta without a pasta machine.
Why make pasta at home?
Dry pasta is pretty much empty calories, wrapped up in plastic. Homemade egg pasta is a really tasty way to eat eggs that even picky eaters enjoy, and because it’s so rich in nutrition from the eggs, sauces can be really simple to make a nourishing and filling meal.
Every week when we have enough eggs from our hens, we make pasta every Monday. This helps me with meal planning because it means there’s less days when I have to figure out completely what I’m making, but there’s still enough variety in pasta that we never get sick of it – sometimes it’s carbonara, other times pesto, sometimes a creamy cheesy sauce, sometimes garlic butter and greens, sometimes it’s oriental noodles with bacon and vegetables, sometimes just lots of butter and grated homemade cheese, if you think of any possible pasta or noodle dish, it can be made with homemade pasta, and that gives a huge amount of variety.
How to make pasta without a pasta machine
1. Start with eggs.
Crack eggs into a small bowl, sniff each one to make sure it’s not off, fish out any bits of shell, and put them in a mixing bowl. Use around 2 eggs per hungry person.
2. Mix in flour and optional salt.
Use an optional half a teaspoon of salt for every five eggs. For flour, the amount you’ll need will depend on the kind of flour you’re using. I don’t measure. I just beat the eggs with a wooden spoon, mix in as much flour as I can mix with the spoon, and then keep adding flour, mixing with my hands. If the dough still seems sticky, keep adding more flour, kneading it in with your knuckles. Break the dough apart, and if it’s still sticky inside, sprinkle the sticky sides with more flour and knead that in with your knuckles. The trick to adding flour is to just add a small amount at a time, and keep adding until the dough is very stiff. I use 100% whole grain wheat flour from my grain mill, but other kinds of wheat and spelt flour will work too.
3. Rest
Allow the dough to rest for at least half an hour, covered with a tea towel or plate. A longer rest is fine too.
4. Roll out and cut
Divide the dough into manageable pieces. Use a rolling pin or a clean glass bottle to roll each piece as thin as it will go, or as thin as you have patience for, dusting the dough with flour to prevent it from sticking. Use a butter knife to cut into strips, or your choice of pasta shapes. When you’ve cut some pasta shapes, spread them out on a tea towel (dish towel) to dry out. Keep in a single layer if possible, as they can get stuck together if you stack them too high.
5. Cook
This next bit happens really quickly once the water is boiling, so make sure you have the sauce ready, along with all the bowls, cutlery, drinks, telling everyone it’s nearly ready, and so on. Bring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil over high heat. Add the pasta, and bring it back to the boil. Once it’s boiling, cook for three minutes. Drain in a colander. You can either mix the pasta into the sauce, or put the pasta in bowls and top with the sauce, whichever you prefer.
Want my sourdough pasta recipe?
About Kate Downham
Kate Downham has been growing, preserving, and cooking real food since 2007. She is the author of four books on homestead skills: A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen, Natural Small Batch Cheesemaking, Backyard Dairy Goats, and Sourdough Without Fail.
Off-grid with her family of nine in the Tasmanian forest, Kate milks her own goats, makes all their cheese, mills all her own grain, and bakes fresh sourdough bread daily.
5 responses to “How to make pasta without a pasta machine”
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I had no idea that the process was so straightforward! One question though; how do you save dough/pasta for the other meals of the week or do you simply have pasta every Monday? I am strictly unable to eat conventional flour so we’ve learned to just do without pasta, for the most part, but I would love to be able to make my own pasta if there’s a way to make it ahead of time.
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We just use ours fresh, but I know some people dry it – not sure how long it will keep, but I would either hang it up, or spread it out in a thin layer so that it can all dry quickly. Once dried, it probably needs to be boiled for slightly longer, but still not anywhere near as long as packet pasta – just taste it every now and then after the first 2 minutes of coming back to a boil and then decide whether you think it’s ready or not.
Let me know how you go. When we have enough eggs I’m interested to try drying it as a way to store eggs for the winter.
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Sounds like a good excuse for an experiment! I think I’ve read somewhere that pasta can be freeze dried for long term storage. I’ll do some looking. Do you use 100% fresh ground flour or mixed with store bought? I use a nutrimill but I haven’t been able to get a grind as fine as the store bought flours.
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I use 100% home ground flour from my electric Komo mill. It seems a little courser than what I used to get from my old Schnitzer mill, but still finer than anything I can get with my hand crank mill. I’ve never used a Nutrimill so am not sure how that would go.
For any flour with large bits of bran in it, mixing it until just mixed and then leaving it to rest for half an hour helps the bran to soften so that it’s much easier to work with after that.
You could always try a small batch with the flour as-is, and then if it’s too course, try sifting it a bit next time to get rid of the biggest pieces.
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Haven’t made my own pasta for ages – thanks for the reminder!
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