Homemade Pasta Guide & Essential Pasta Recipes

Homemade Pasta Guide & Essential Pasta Recipes Welcome To Our Homemade Pasta Guide!

Ciao, tutti!

Welcome to the Salt & Wind Travel community and thanks for downloading our Homemade Pasta guide.

A lot of you asked for tips and tricks for making pasta from scratch so we wanted to share this guide with you! It's filled with tips for making pasta from scratch as well as the pasta dough recipes and the pasta sauce recipes to make with said homemade pasta.

When we lead our Salt & Wind Travel group trips to Italy we do a lot of hands-on cooking classes and the pasta workshop is always the most popular so we're sharing a bit of that with you here.

Read on, cook away, and tag #swsociety on social to share your creations!

Happy Cooking!

-Aida, Kristen, and Team Salt & Wind Travel

| SALTANDWIND.COM | Homemade Pasta Guide: Ingredients

Across Italy there are countless types of pasta ranging from sheets to noodles to handmade and machine-made shapes. Generally, you'll find more eggs in pastas in Northern Italy and fewer to no eggs in pastas from the south. To know which are the most well-known pastas from each region of Italy, skip ahead a few pages for our map!

But first, some pantry talk: to make the best pasta, you'll need the best ingredients. Here's what you'll want to make sure you have on hand:

EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL The highest standard (and most regulated term) around olive oil is "extra virgin" -- an indicator that the oil is free of defects and hasn't been treated with chemicals or heat. We use it in all our Italian recipes including for making homemade pasta dough.

SEMOLINA FLOUR A coarsely ground wheat flour that is high in gluten, semolina is used a lot in Italian cooking -- especially in pizza, pasta, and breads. Across Italy you'll find homemade pasta recipes with all semolina, a mix of semolina and "00" flour, or a mixture of the two. We like to mix the two for our basic homemade pasta recipe.

"00" FLOUR This is an Italian flour that is milled so it's finer (almost dusty) than most American flours. There can be a variety of types with some specifically for pizza and others for pastas so be sure to read the packaging!

ALL PURPOSE FLOUR If you don't want to search out semolina or "00" flour, you can use all-purpose. Just be sure to buy a high quality one like King Arthur. Also know that using all-purpose flour for pasta can cause it to be harder to make by hand so you'll likely want to use the food processor to make the dough and pasta machine when you shape it!

| SALTANDWIND.COM | Homemade Pasta Guide: Pasta Making Tips

Before you jump into the recipes, here are our top pasta-making tips!

ALL PASTAS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL Every region of Italy has a pasta it's known for from Lombardy's casoncelli and Tuscany's gnudi to Umbria's pici or Sicily's busiate.

DIFFERENT PASTAS FOR DIFFERENT SAUCES The different pasta shapes are good at absorbing different types of sauce with shorter pastas (penne or cavatelli) "grabbing" onto sauce more than longer noodles. Also, pasta with ridges (think rigatoni) grab sauce better than smooth pasta.

START WITH LESS FLOUR Generally, start by making a wetter dough because it's easier to add more flour than it is to add water. However, be sparing with the flour because you don't want the final pasta to be caked in flour!

KNEAD AND REST A LONG TIME The longer you knead the pasta, the better the gluten and the easier it'll be to roll out later. Just make sure to rest it at least 30 minutes before shaping it for best results!

FREEZE TO HOLD SHAPE You can cover the fresh pasta with a kitchen towel and leave at room temp if you're going to cook it that day. Otherwise, freeze it on a baking sheet then, once frozen, transfer to an airtight container for up to a month. This helps it stay fresh and hold its shape when it cooks!

DON'T DRAIN FRESH PASTA USE TONGS Cook the pasta for just 1 to 3 minutes in heavily salted water but, when it's ready, don't drain it in a colander or it might stick together. Instead pull the pasta from the water with tongs and place it directly in the sauce you want to serve it with!