Mixing Dough Ingredients for Making a Homemade Pasta

Mixing Dough Ingredients for Making a Homemade Pasta
Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and I started showing you the basic preparation and the elements that go into making fresh pasta and it's to the point now, as I said this is a pasta dough where I can't really do much good anymore with the fork, it's done what it needs to do. So the rest of it needs to be done with your hands. So now we have the essential kind of dough ball if you will in the bowl and that is exactly what we are after. So we've got kind of a little tacky feel to this dough ball which is fine, it's what we want. So we are pulling in the residual or excess semolina flour from the bowl, at this point. This really is a feel thing not just because you are cooking something or making it with your hands, you are going to have to kind of feel to tell. Now you don't want to leave the dough ball too tacky because if you do it is going to cause headaches and problems for you in the pasta machine and it will stick up in the gears and the pasta will stick inside the machine and it just won't turn out the way you want it. So we want to get that wetness, that tackiness, out of it but still just a tiny bit moist. We want it pliable. When we punch it, we want it to be able to punch back at us so that we know that it has been mixed correctly. So I've gotten about all of the residual semolina out of the bowl here and the pasta itself is just a tiny bit moist but not as tacky, so any of that residual that is left in the bowl, we are just going to go ahead and leave it in there. We've used up about all that we need to in the bowl, so he goes away and we will just put this on our cutting board. We are going to start to knead this with our hands. Now as I knead it, there is a million different ways you can do this. You can use your knuckles this way or you can use the heel of your hands. What we are really trying to do is just work this over and over on itself. I'm starting to feel a little tacky that I've gotten it out of the bowl. So I've got some residual moisture in there. So I've just got some more semolina, straight semolina and I am going to start to pat that around from the outside and as we knead it, you can see, we are getting a real nice color out of this and nice consistency. When you punch it, you can see that. It starts to come back out at you which is good and that is what we want our dough to do. As you can see, we don't have a lot of flour and semolina and salt and ingredients all over the table, which is what I kind of like so that I won't have to clean things up later. So I will continue just working on this pasta for approximately 4 more minutes and I will add a little bit more semolina to the cutting board as we go along. We will show you what the finished product looks like after that.