Claudia, over at Cook – Eat – FRET, recently posted a pasta recipe and mentioned she’s used pasta she bought somewhere (and it is probably definitely –after all, it is a link at Claudia’s– the best you can find commercially) but since I have a recipe for pasta that is homemade and very good, I thought I’d pass it on.

This recipe came from a cook named Giuseppe, who used to have a wonderful restaurant in Madison. He started out by taking over a former burger joint and turning it into nirvana. You had to make reservations – it only had 12 tables – but the food was great. Anyway, we were in a (now closed) cooking store in Goodlettsville when we noticed they had a kitchen. On further investigation, we learned that Giuseppe was going to teach a pasta class there, so we signed up. It was great fun for us and him but the egg noodle recipe is simple and easy.

You need a pasta machine (we’ve got a manual one that I hand-crank and clamp to the counter), a drying rack (ours disassembles and goes in storage, and a food processor. This recipe can be doubled, halved, tripled, etc., to your hearts content. Two cups of flour, two eggs and two tablespoons of water. That’s it. You can go all out and use semolina flour or Gold Medal. It doesn’t matter. It still is like nothing ever bought in a store. If you have small eggs, try three. Process in the food processor until it looks like little crumbs of flour. It will be moist when you grab a chunk of it, but not tacky wet. Add more flour or water if you need to get away from tacky or away from it won’t stick tgether.

Take a handful of it and pat it out until you’ve got something that you can run through the rollers on the pasta machine. The machine has a dial with numbering from 1 to 7. Seven makes angel hair, six is for most pasta. You start at one and crank the dough through. I run it back through at 2 or 3 and get it a little flatter. At this point, you have something with irregular edges. Fold it up in thirds or quarters from the short sides inwards so you end up with a folded edge on each side. Drop the pasta machine dial down a number and roll it back through. Do it again on a higher setting until you get to 6. You’ll crank with one hand and pull the pasta out with the other. It will stick together if you just let it pile up under the machine.

Once you have it to the desired thickness, run it through the cutters. We have 2 different pasta machines. One has removable cutters and one doesn’t. I prefer the one with removable cutters but if you only plan to make spaghetti and fettucine you don’t need it.  As you cut  bit of dough, hang it over the drying rack until it becomes dry (and brittle. Clean-up will be involved.) When you are ready to cook it, drop it in boiling salted water just like store bought pasta. I add a bit of olive oil to my water. When the pasta floats to the top of the water, it’s done. That will be very, very quickly.