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I'll add some of my limited knowledge here about pasta-making, if I may.. my dad has a pasta machine and does it occasionally, and I've watched/helped a few times.
We used to use normal flour, and that gives you perfectly good pasta, but for best results, we've got actual durum wheat semolina. It's very fine, obviously, no coarser than normal wheat flour, but it's the proper durum wheat used for pasta. Our is De Cecco brand, if you can find it - they make [the best, though pricy] dried pasta as well. Our normal recipe is 1 egg per 100g flour (all of the egg, not just the yolk), a pinch of salt, a few drops of olive oil. Add a few drops of water if absolutely necessary, but try to avoid it. The durum wheat stuff *can* be used without egg, but we generally prefer the eggy variety. Either way, knead it into a dry dough and run through the pasta machine lots of times. My dad usually has the table we work on well-floured, though last time, I made the dough so dry that we didn't need *any*.
Experiments: We've done some mucking about with other ingredients. Buckwheat works, we did the same thing as above (1 egg/100g), the dough was quite nice but the cooked pasta became ended up rather brittle - mixing with durum wheat would probably improve it. An interesting one was our pumpkin pasta - I can't give any measurements, but basically we boiled some pumpkin flesh until it was just mush, and then kept adding flour until we had the right pasta consistency. That's all - no egg used. Then process into pasta as usual. We've thought about trying to make gluten-free pasta (inspired by the coeliac we had over for dinner recently), but haven't got round to that yet. Of course, as far as I can make out, our buckwheat variety would've been gluten-free, but my idea here was to use something like rice or corn flour, egg, and possibly some lentil or chickpea flour for stickiness. Not sure if it'd work - only one way to find out... |
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