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Pasta is comfort food, whether or not you grew up in an Italian kitchen. Some of my first memories are of eating spaghetti, slurping up the long noodles and licking up the sauce. The ingredients in pasta are so simple, flour, eggs, olive oil and water. How can something so simple taste so good? If you have never made your own pasta at home it is time to treat yourself. Homemade pasta is one of the great marvels of the kitchen. So, roll up your sleeves, gather the kids or grandkids, friends and family and get ready to transform wet and dry ingredients into dough. And from the dough into noodles and from noodles into comfort food.

A pasta machine is one of the tools that makes the job of turning dough into noodles easier. You can do it the old fashioned way and roll your dough into thin sheets using a wooden rolling pin, but I find that a uniform thickness is best achieved using a machine. There are electric machines and there are manual machines that you crank by hand. Weston, Lello and Imperia pasta machines are well known brands of electric pasta makers. The Kitchenaid pasta attachment is an wonderful addition to the Kitchenaid mixer for making pasta. Atlas, Imperia and CucinaPro are all good manufacturers of manual pasta makers. I personally have used the Atlas pasta machine for many years with absolutely delicious results.

If you are going to mix the dough by hand, start by placing the flour in a large bowl and make a well in the center. Crack the eggs into a smaller bowl and beat them lightly to break the yolks. Add the oil and water and mix well before pouring the liquids into the well in the center of the flour. Continue to mix with a fork or a wooden spoon until the dry ingredients are moistened and begin to clump together. Now roll up your sleeves and get ready to get your hands on the dough to finish the mixing.

Dust your hands with flour and begin to gather the clumps and begin kneading the dough right in the bowl. Grab the mass over onto itself, pushing and turning and folding the dough until it no longer sticks to the side of the bowl. Once you have one cohesive clump of dough, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, a large wooden cutting board works great, and continue to knead for 2 to 3 minutes.

The dough should be smooth and shiny on the outside, soft throughout with no lumps, and it should be stretchy. If the dough seems too sticky or hard, you may want to adjust it with small amounts of water or flour until you get the right consistency. All pasta dough benefits from resting before rolling it out. Let your dough rest for about 30 minutes at room temperature, during which time the dough will soften and relax.

Divide your dough into quarters and work with one piece of dough at a time. The general idea is to start rolling the dough through the thickest setting on your pasta machine, gradually decreasing the setting to roll a thin sheet of pasta. If you are making raviolis you will place the filling on one sheet of pasta, cover it with a second sheet and then use a pastry wheel to cut between the ravioli squares. All pasta maker machines come with some attachments for cutting the pasta into other shapes like tagliatelle and tagliolini. Some of the electric ones will also provide an extruding attachment for making rounded shapes like spaghetti and capellini. You can even cut the sheets by hand into strips that are 1 1/2 inches wide, like papardelle.

After you have cut and shaped your pasta, the pasta needs to dry out a bit before it is cooked. Dry the pasta at room temperature on a lightly floured board or baking sheet. The flour helps keep the pieces of pasta from sticking to each other and helps seal the noodle. If you have made more pasta than you need for the meal you can freeze it on a baking sheet and then put the frozen pasta into freezer bags or containers for future use. If you just had a ravioli making party, you will be able to enjoy homemade raviolis any time. Pasta also dries well, although you will still want to cook it us within a couple of days because your dough does not have preservatives in it. Long pasta shapes can be dried in little nests or you can use a pasta drying rack, which allows you to dry the pasta as long threads.

Once your family has had a hand in making fresh pasta at home and eating the results, you won\’t want to go back to commercially processed pasta again. Homemade pasta has a delicate, rich flavor and a smoother texture than store bought pastas. Making pasta at home is a fun family project that everyone can do together and it will become one of the warm and comforting memories you share in the future. So start a family tradition of fun and laughter and good food. Make pasta-making a regular event in your kitchen.

Making fresh pasta at home has been a Lauder family event for years. Kids, grandkids, friends and neighbors all take a hand in making the dough and gathering at the table to savor the results. Watch a video on rolling dough through a pasta machine on Geri\’s website, find great cookbooks and select a pasta machine for your next family pasta party.

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