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Homemade Pasta

We picked-up something that I have been wanting for over 5 years, but just kept forgetting about it. A hand-crank pasta machine. I think this purchase kept getting put off because they always appeared quite intimidating to operate. Turning the crank, feeding the dough in and pulling it out so it doesn't get all bunched up. Well, fear not. It is really quite easy to do all by yourself.

For our first foray into pasta making, we decided to make ravioli. Go big or go home, right?

Making a well to put the eggs in, incorporating the eggs into the flour

I looked up some videos on youtube and consulted some cookbooks before deciding to go with Jamie Oliver's recipe. In the end the pasta turned out great, but I must have miss calculated grams into cups because I needed an extra egg to bind the flour. Doing it by hand was great, but it takes a lot less time to using a food processor.

Feeding the dough into the machine, pulling the dough out

Start rolling that sucker out. Basically, you can't screw this up, just make sure you have 5 to 6 feet of space for the pasta to spread out into.

Wendy laying out the filling and cutting the ravioli.

After you have rolled the pasta out to you desired thickness, start cutting down into a more manageable size. Our pasta was cut into about 2 inch widths that we re roughly 18 inches long. We stated filling them with a tablespoon of filling and then cut back a bit. It all depends on the width of your pasta. Have a pot of salted boiling water ready and cook the ravioli for about a minute.

Homemade portobello ravioli with brown butter sauce.

Paired with a simple brown butter sauce, these were pretty amazing.