Making Pasta: Part 2

This is the part that's a little trickier, and will take some time to get it just right. I currently use the Kitchen Aid attachment, because it is the quickest way to roll the pasta out at work. However, when i'm at home, I use the hand turning pasta machine/ tool.

The best way I find to get this started is to manually roll out the dough to about a quarter inch keeping the width of the pasta machine in mind.  Once achieved, lightly flour the pasta dough on both sides and pass the pasta through the largest setting (1 usually), and fold the ends in (again keeping in mind the width of the machine).

Roll the pasta dough with a rolling pin to a quarter inch again and pass through the machine.

From this point you would pass the pasta twice at each setting beginning with one.

At first this will seem possibly easy but once you get the the middle of rolling the pasta through the machine it might feel a bit overwhelming because the pasta begins to thin and get longer and longer. This can be a hassle sometimes, being that if you do not keep an eye on the pasta it can feed into the machine wrong, messing up all your hard work. The best way to get around this is to cut the pasta at a reasonable length and keep an eye on it. If for some reason the pasta does feed into the machine wrong (and it will) just stay calm and turn the machine off, turn the setting on the pasta machine to a larger setting so that you can remove your pasta and save what you can.

(If you choose to cut the pasta, lightly flour on both sides and cover with a towl. This prevents your pasta from sticking to each other and drying out)

After you've managed to pass all this pasta through the machine its time to cut it to your liking. For this I prefer to use a pizza cutter, does the job just right.