Once or twice a year Sarah’s Aunt Jane and Uncle Kevin have the pair of us over for dinner. Jane and Kevin know great food and good wine, so we are always guaranteed an excellent meal, wonderful conversation, and a ride home. And an after-dinner cheeseboard that is to die for. Yum.

It seems that one of Jane’s favourite things to serve is homemade pasta, and since Sarah and I are such keeners in the kitchen, we’re always enlisted as extra labor (we are paid in delicious wine and appetizers). We often help assemble ravioli after Jane has prepared the dough and filling—she’ll tell us tales of the adorable little restaurant they first had the ravioli at on their last trip to Italy as well roll and fill.

Anyhow, one of the best things about homemade pasta is that it’s far easier than most people think. That means it’s a great thing to make if you want to impress somebody without actually investing too much effort. It’s also a great thing to get your guests to help with, as everyone tends to congregate in the kitchen for dinner parties anyways!

The dough after kneading, but before resting.

Feeding the dough through the rollers for the first time.

The dough is unbelievably simple. Three ingredients—flour, eggs, and a pinch of salt. I’d recommend grabbing a bag of Tipo 00 flour (Italian pasta flour) at your local moderately fancy grocery store, but all purpose will do the trick. Then you mix, knead, and wait.

Feeding the pasta through the rollers after folding the rounded ends down to square the piece off.

After waiting comes the rolling. I highly recommend investing in a pasta maker for this part! You can do it with a rolling pin, but if that’s your plan I hope you’re not hungry when you start making the pasta or you may start eating it raw 😉

The fettuccine rollers.

Fettuccine!

Homemade Pasta

312g (11oz) Tipo 00 flour (or all purpose)
A pinch of salt
3 large eggs

Stir the flour and salt together in a large bowl, and then create a well in the middle of the flour.

Crack the eggs into the well in the center of the flour. Using your fingers, swirl the eggs together, and then start swirling in the flour. Once you’ve incorporated enough flour to have a soft dough, tip everything out onto the counter and start kneading. The dough will be quite sticky, but resist the urge to add more flour—there should be enough there. As you knead, the dough will smooth out.

Once the dough is smooth and you can poke it and it’ll bounce back, wrap it in cling film and let it sit for 20 minutes.

Now it’s time to roll it out! Cut it into eighths, and re-wrap all but one. Dust your pasta maker with flour, and open the rollers to the widest setting. Flatten the dough out until it’s about 1cm thick and start feeding it through the rollers, tightening the rollers as needed. I recommend folding the ends down as they tend to come out quite rounded; folding them over helps square everything out.

Once you’ve run the pasta through the tightest roller setting, it’s ready to use! Here you can see I slid on the fettuccine/spaghetti attachment and made fettuccine, but the possibilities are endless!