One of my Day Zero challenges was to make fresh pasta. My good friend Jez came over and helped me out with this one, she's most awesome.
We started off with a combination of 13.5oz rice flour, 2.5oz buckwheat
flour and a tablespoon of gluten powder, rather than regular wheat
flour, to fit in with my diet strategy. We forgot to add salt at this
point, but managed to squeeze some in later. The salt is really important.
Into this, we of course added 5 eggs.
A quick blend with a little nutmeg and a couple of tablespoons of sunflower
oil and we ended up with...
...a bunch of dough crumbs, ready to be kneaded.
I gave it a good knead to get it into shape. The dough was pretty stiff.
To give the pasta some colour, we wilted a whole load of spinach and
drained it off, then dropped it into the food processor.
This got mixed in with half the dough, but it turned out to be a little
moist still (could have done with squeezing out a load more moisture) so
we added another sixth of the dough and it was pretty near OK.
We ended up adding a little more rice flour to the mix to get it into
a nice dough.
We added a tablespoon of water to the uncoloured dough to get it a little
more pliable. The whole thing turned into three lumps, and we ended up
freezing one of the green ones for later.
In lieu of a fancy pasta roller, we rolled the pasta out pretty thin...
...and then rolled it up...
...and then sliced it neatly with a nice sharp knife.
This unrolled into some lovely fettucine, which we laid out on a baking
sheet to dry out a little.
We did the same stuff with the spinach pasta; this was much easier to
roll but stuck the first time so we redid it with more flour.
When it got to this point, it was really really thin!
The slices came out really well, but the pasta was still a little sticky
and it took some teasing to get it to unroll nicely.
We dried everything out in a warmish oven to make it easier to handle.
Cooking was done in the traditional manner, getting a nice rolling boil
and then dropping the pasta in. The thicker uncoloured pasta took a lot
longer so we started off with that first, then added the green later.
The whole thing was served up with a lovely mushroom sauce - a whole
load of sautéed mushrooms blended with a white sauce with some
garlic and crushed chilli. It was most delicious.