Ingredients for Making a Homemade Pasta

Ingredients for Making a Homemade Pasta
Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today I am going to show you the basic preparation for fresh homemade pasta. One of the advantages is knowing how to make this dish is that the cook time is much much shorter and it is just a nice fresher more vibrant product than is dried pasta. I've got 2 cups of semolina flour and semolina flour is especially made for pasta and for pasta preparation. Now there is a million different recipes out there that combine all purpose flour along with it. I tend to like to use just the straight semolina flour simply because it makes a more firmer product. Different chefs and different cooks will tell you different ratios for the flour and the semolina simply because they are making pasta for ravioli's perhaps or they are making thinner angel hair pasta, things of that nature. So I am showing this recipe to you because it is a little more stripped down. In a lot of the recipes you will hear about a well method and usually that entails making the pasta on a flat table and what happens is you end up getting flour and materials all over your kitchen floor and all over the table as well. So I've got a way that I am going to show you where I've prepared actually inside the mixing bowl. So I've got 2 cups of Semolina flour as I said before and essentially using the well methods in the sense that I am going to hollow out a little spot and make kind of a volcano if you will or well, however you want to look at it. So to the 2 cups of Semolina flour, I am going to add 4 whole eggs, careful not to drop any shells in there. Now at this point we are going to season this in a matter of speaking and I've got some extra virgin oil which I am going to drizzle into the middle here to give it some flavor and texture because simply Semolina flour or eggs would not hold up on their own. I've got some fresh ground sea salt here. So I am going to use a few pinches of that in the middle. Now the idea behind this and I've got a basic dinner fork with some heavy long tines and I find that these are a little bit easier to mix with. I don't want to use a wire whisk because all the items will stick to it and that won't happen. So what you are trying to do is beat your eggs, olive oil and your salt, all into the center first of your well. So gain and I like use a fork like this because it keeps everything in the center in the center and I am not incorporating the Semolina as yet until I achieved all one color with my wet mix. The wet mix of course being your 4 raw eggs, the olive oil and the salt. Now there is other things that you could throw in here at this point too to add flavorings and things of that nature. But keep it minimal because essentially what we are going is making a pasta dough and a dough can be kind of temperamental if you sort throwing a bunch of extra ingredients into it. Again this is just a simple basic stripped down recipe for today's purposes so that you can see the basic concept of what we are trying to achieve. So if you notice, we've hit pretty much on one color that we are looking for in there so our eggs are beaten well, the olive oil is incorporated correctly. Now simply I am going to start widening the stirs here if you will and pulling in semolina flour into the center of this slowly, not all at once. What you want to do with this is do it gradually. As you can see I am just pulling in Semolina. I'll shake the bowl a little bit every now and then. So we pull the Semolina into the center and it will eventually, all the semolina in the bowl, will be incorporated into the middle of the well. We can get a little bit more aggressive with it now that it starting to get some thickness, starting to turn into kind of a paste. As you see, we've got a little bit different color. We've got some semolina flour mixed into there. It's getting a little harder to stir which is nice. I'm always talking about colors but you want to achieve one smooth color so that you know everything is being incorporated correctly, not too quickly. The tendency of some people is wanting to just start pulling in the semolina flour, a whole bunch at a time and just start turning it with their hands and we are not ready for that yet. So I am going to continue this process exactly what we are doing here and we will come back in a minute show you what the finished product looks.