As I mentioned yesterday, I now have a pasta machine. Yay!
To make “proper” pasta you’re supposed to use OO flour, but from what I can gather it’s not readily available in most Irish supermarkets. If anyone knows of suppliers please let me know!
In the interim I’ll probably use “strong flour” or another variant which I can get in an Irish supermarket such as SuperQuinn, Dunnes Stores or Tesco.
But the real question for me is in relation to making the pasta itself.
I love cooking, but I get rather frustrated with recipes, as so many of them assume you’re preparing food for a minimum of four people.
The number of recipes for anything that have been scaled down to one person portions is slim and when you get into something like making your own pasta I haven’t had any success at all.
So if you know of any recipes either online or in physical recipe books that can help please please let me know!
Roma’s Pizza and Pasta flour is tipo 00 and the best I’ve found widely available in Ireland. I have seen the “Barilla” brand available in some specialist Italian shops but it’s not common unfortunately.
if you can’t find tipo 00 use plain flour instead, I’ve found strong flour makes for a more “Chewy” pasta and it’s not pleasant imho.
As for a recipe, here’s a rough one. Depending on the size of the egg’s you might need a little more or less flour and I occasionally use a splash of olive oil if thing’s look a little dry.
Mix 100g of tipo 00 with one egg per portion required. Mix the ingredients together until it forms a dough and then knead it for about 10 minutes like you were making bread. Roll it out, folding it in half and rolling again repeatedly to build structure. Once it’s silky to the touch roll it out to the thickness you require and shape accordingly.
I can’t recommend a pasta machine enough to help with the rolling it just makes it so much less of a chore.
Also, it’s worth noting that the unrolled dough can be frozen in portions to be rolled out and used another time. it’s just as much effort to mix and knead one portion as it is six 😉
Thanks! That’s really helpful 🙂