Homemade Tagliatelle & Pesto

Learn how to make your own pasta!

Posted by Tom

About

This was our first attempt at pasta, and it worked really well. It's (surprisingly) a *lot* tastier than store-bought dried pasta. Rolling the pasta is a little bit of work, but it's fun and easy to pick up.

We found our pasta flour in a large supermarket.

Your pasta will end up much much longer than store-bought, so be prepared for some Lady-And-The-Tramp moments if you share!

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You Will Need (7 things)

  • 3 tbsp Parmesan
  • 1 cup Basil
  • 1 cup Walnuts
  • 8 Sun Dried Tomatoes
  • 275 g Type 00 Pasta Flour
  • 3 x Egg(s)
  • ½ cup Olive Oil

Steps (12 steps, 45 minutes)

  1. 1

    Put the flour in a bowl. Make a well, and crack the eggs into the center.

  2. 2

    Mix with a fork. Bit by bit, the flour will combine with the eggs. Keep going until you're left with a ball of dough.

  3. 3

    Knead the dough. It'll start dough-ey and end up really smooth and pasta-ey! Keep adding flour if it gets too sticky.

  4. 4

    Once it's smooth, cut into 3...

  5. 5

    then cover with cling film, and leave to stand for at least 30 minutes.

  6. 6

    Rolling time! We used a pasta machine with 9 settings - 1 was the thickest, and 9 the thinnest.

    Start with one of your dough balls, and run it through at the thickest setting a few times. It'll come out with a rough texture. Each time, dust with a little flour, and fold back into a thick parcel, and then run through the machine again.

    This will change your dough again - it'll get even smoother.

    Then, start increasing the setting on your machine - we added 2 notches each time. Again, add a little flour, but don't fold. The dough will get really long! Don't worry about the shape now though - we'll get it even later.

  7. 7

    Once you've worked up through 1,3,5,7 and 9, you should be left with a *really* long sheet of pasta.

    Now, keep folding the sheet up into a square parcel. Rotate the square 90 degrees, set the machine to the widest setting, and do the whole thing again. This time, increase just 1 setting on the pasta machine each time. The pasta should come out the full width of the machine.

    It'll be slightly shorter, but it'll be a nice full-width sheet of pasta. It'll take a little while to work through each and every setting, but it's worth it!

  8. 8

    The fun part! Our machine has a cutting attachment too - for linguine and tagliatelle. We used the tagliatelle one, put the pasta sheet through and... tagliatelle came out!

  9. 9

    Make sure you don't have lumps, or uncut strips. Then, put the pasta to the side. It only takes a 2-3 minutes to cook in a large pan of boiling water. When it floats, it's done.

  10. 10

    To make the pesto, chop up the sun dried tomatoes, basil and walnuts and grind together with a mortar and pestle. You can use a blender too if you want to do it faster.

  11. 11

    Add the parmesan and olive oil and mix together.

  12. 12

    Cook the pasta for a couple of minutes in boiling water until it floats and serve hot with your pesto and a sprinkling of herbs.

    Share with a friend you'd like to impress with your new culinary skills. Tell them you learned from Ritagliare E Conservare... or Cut Out + Keep if they don't speak Italian...