About four months ago, maybe more, we decided to buy our first pasta maker… but it’s taken this long until we’ve actually been motivated enough to use it. Not that we thought it would be terribly time-consuming and difficult, but I guess we haven’t thought of actually getting in and testing it out! After watching it done so many times on MasterChef, we really wanted to see how good fresh pasta was.
It turns out, it’s actually heaps of fun to use and quite easy once you get the hang of it. Plus, it’s true when people say that once you taste fresh pasta, you’ll never want to go back to the packaged variety!
We just used a basic recipe for this first time which we found at: http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/12460/basic+fresh+pasta
There’s also suggestions for other things you can add to it to make different variations – beetroot pasta, fresh pesto pasta, spinach pasta, saffron pasta… I’m sure you could basically try anything!
Once we had made the pasta sheets, we cut out circles using a cutter as we were making half ravioli, half fettuccine.
For the ravioli, we mixed in a bowl some chopped spinach leaves and ricotta. Once the circles were cut in the pasta, we put a dollop of the spinach mixture into the middle, put a light layer of whisked egg around the outside of the pasta circle and then put a second piece of pasta on top, closing it up properly by using a fork around the outside.
The fettuccine was easy as there’s an attachment with our pasta maker. Once we’d made a pasta sheet, we just put it through the attachment and we had fettuccine!
For cooking it, we had a boiling pot of water with some salt added and it probably took about 8 mins for the ravioli and a bit less for the fettuccine. It was all trial and error though – we kept testing it until we were happy with it!
We served it with a semi-dried tomato sauce and some of the spinach and ricotta mixture on top. Delish!!
Please see the photo gallery for the whole process!
Cooking with a Puppet 