Picspam: Playing with Pasta - Noodles
WARNING - PICTURE HEAVY
This is a technique post to help anyone who is planning on making noodles with their pasta maker. And as a self-reminder of what I tried and what worked and what didn't. The noodles produced in this post will be thrown away as I'm using the pasta to clean the roller and cutters of my pasta maker. I wiped the outside of the machine and the cutters as carefully as I could, with a damp cloth and then dried everything meticulously, but the box they were in was in pieces and mice had taken over the place for the last 2 years.
I made the semolina dough I had tried before and, using the advice of the owner of the store where I bought my ravioli tray, let the dough sit on the counter overnight. Unfortunately, I wasn't in the mood to use it the next day so I refrigerated the wrapped dough and attempted this experiment on the second day.
My 6" (15 cm) pasta machine roller settings go from 1 (thickest) to 7 (thinnest) and can be used to make sheets for lasagna or ravioli. The cutters on the left are 6mm and 1mm widths.
The noodles below came from a quarter portion of the pasta dough.
Noodle Trio - top right (setting 6, cut on the wider cutters), bottom right (setting 7, cut on the wider cutters) and top left (setting 6, cut on the narrower cutters).
1. Top right - Setting 6, cut on the wider (6mm) cutters. I had to pry the noodles in half to get them to be 6mm wide.
2. Bottom right - Setting 7, cut on the wider (6mm) cutters. Because the dough was so thin, the strands cut cleanly into 6mm noodles without any additional work.
3. Top left - Setting 6, cut on the narrower cutters. You can see that some of the noodles are twice as wide (2mm) as the others (1mm). They didn't separate cleanly without being pulled apart by hand.
How to Roll Pasta with a Manual Pasta Maker
I started with 1/4 of the semolina dough I made, flattened it with the heel of my hand, sprinkled some flour on both sides and then ran it through the rollers on setting 1. I should have tried to square up the pasta at this stage before running it through the rollers for the first time ... but I forgot.
First roll through of the pasta on setting 1 is not very regular but it wasn't a big deal, after all.
Fold the sheet above in threes, like you would for an envelope, and run it through the machine again on setting 1. Put the narrow edge in first.
Running trifold of pasta dough through machine. Do this 3 times and then roll through once on each of the subsequent settings until it's thin enough for your purpose.
You will probably have to cut the sheets in half or thirds at some point so, they don't get too long and hard to handle, if you're doing this on your own. It's especially difficult if you don't have the clamp that's supposed to hold the pasta machine onto your bench and need to hold on to the machine, rotate the handle, feed the pasta with one hand at the top and support the resulting thinner sheet with another hand, so that it doesn't pile up. If you count, that requires you to have FOUR hands.
Result of first run of trifold above
Result of run through higher settings
Cut the strip of pasta from above in half and run each half through again
Another couple of runs through the rollers
The top sheet is the nicer half of the shredded sheet above. The bottom sheet is the result of passing the pasta through at a setting of 7, the thinnest setting on my machine.
All of the noodles in the pictures below were cut from pasta that had been rolled at a setting of 6.
The noodle at the very bottom was cut with the wider (6mm) cutter used for fettuccine. Above that is a strand of noodle cut using the narrower cutter which hasn't split in half (so it's 2mm wide) due to the dough not being thin enough. If you are very careful, you can pry the two attached strands apart to get 1mm wide noodles.
LESSON LEARNED: Let the rolled sheet dry on the counter for about 10 minutes before putting it through the cutters so that it will cut cleanly.