Homemade Pasta Dough

Once you try making your own pasta, you’ll never turn back! Tastier, thriftier, and more nutritious than store bought — these noodles are FAST, EASY, and require NO special equipment!

Intimidated by making your own homemade pasta?

Don’t be!

It’s really and truly very easy!

You don’t need a pasta maker. All you really need is a rolling pin and a knife.

While it takes a more time to make the dough than it does to open a box of prepackaged pasta, it takes significantly less time to cook your pasta!

The cook time for homemade pasta is roughly 3 minutes.

Made with eggs and flour, homemade pasta dough is a much healthier, protein rich (and filling!) food.

There are no weird ingredients in it.

In the spirit of healthy frugal meals, you don’t even need to buy a special flour for your pasta. Just use regular all purpose flour.

Let’s get right to cooking!

Ingredients

• 2 cups of all purpose flour
• 4 eggs

Knead your dough and let rest

In a mixing bowl, mix together 4 eggs and 2 cups of all purpose flour until well mixed.

Then, turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead for a good 10 minutes.

Alternatively, you can do this in a stand mixer.

You want to activate the gluten in your dough!

Once you have sufficiently kneaded your dough, shape it into a ball, and let rest for 30 minutes.

The rest period allows your dough to fully hydrate and makes it much easier to work with!

Don’t let your dough rest for any longer than an hour at MAXIMUM, otherwise it will be too dry to work with.

Those eggs make the dough dry out QUICKLY!

Roll out dough and cut noodles

After your dough has rested, knead it again (you don’t have to do it for as long) just to get it nice and smooth, and to reincorporate any outside bits of dough that may have started to dry out.

Reshape into a ball, then cut your ball into fourths.

Divide each fourth into fourths.

You’ll have 16 little dough balls all togther.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out your dough balls into long strips.

Get them as thin as you can — about 1/16″ in thickness.

From here, you can keep them as lasagna noodles, or use a knife (or rolling pasta cutter, which is really quite helpful!) to cut your strips into the noodles.

You can make any shape noodle you want — from linguine to egg noodles!

Cooking your noodles

Cooking your noodles is fast and easy!

Boil some water — a lot of people like to add salt to flavor the noodles a bit, but it’s totally up to your preference.

Cook your noodles in small batches so they don’t all stick together in a lump of (cooked) dough.

Very gently push them down with a spoon if you need to, just to make sure they get covered with the boiling water (if you’re using a shallow pot).

Cooking the noodles doesn’t take long at all — you’re basically waiting for them to float up to the top of the water, and then waiting a minute or so after that. It only takes about 3 minutes (no more than 5!) to cook them.

Use a splotted spoon to remove your cooked noodles from the boiling water. Transfer to a dish, or better yet — first transfer to a bowl of ice water. This stops the cooking process, and helps your noodles to not stick together!

That’s it! Add your favorite pasta sauce and toppings and enjoy!

Why don’t you use this recipe to try out my fancy rolled lasagna roses?