It's been a while since I've made some delicious homemade pasta noodles but lately a few of my bloggy friends have been making them and well you know the old saying... monkey see, monkey do! *grin*.
Plus I don't want one bit of the broccoli we picked from the garden yesterday to go to waste. So I thought I'd be adventurous and make some gloriously green fettucine noodles using our fresh broccoli as the colorant :)
I started by steaming just under 3/4 of a pound of broccoli. I weighed it on my kitchen scale and it was 11 ounces before it went into the steamer. As soon as it was just tender I removed it from the heat and let it cool completely before moving on to the next step of pureeing it along with 1 egg and 1 tablespoon of dried basil in my blender until it was nice and smooth.
To finish your pasta dough you will need:
2 eggs
3 cups of flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon lukewarm water
Place your flour and salt in a large bowl or directly on your counter and make a nice big well in the center. In the well add your eggs, oil, water and broccoli puree.
With a fork slowly start to beat your eggs, mixing them into your broccoli puree and then start to gradually pull the surrounding flour into your wet ingredients until it has taken on a dough like consistency and you can start to work it with your hands.
This is probably the only part of making homemade noodles that really requires any elbow grease *grin*. Keep working your dough kneading in a little bit of flour at a time until you have a smooth and silky feeling dough. It took me about 10 minutes and around a 1/4 cup of extra flour to get my dough to a gorgeous soft green stage. Once you've finished kneading cover your dough with a greased bowl and let it rest for 20 minutes.
While your dough is resting you can bring out your pasta machine and clamp it to your counter so you are ready to start rolling :) Don't worry if you don't have a pasta machine. You can roll the dough by hand with your rolling pin and use your pizza cutter to make strips to!
This is my favorite part. I just love to see the dough work through the rollers into long sheets :) It helps to have a second set of hands but definitely not mandatory.
Cut off a chunk of dough a little bigger than a golf ball but not as big as a tennis ball. Does that work for mental imagery? *grin*. Dust your chunk of dough with flour so that it won't stick to the rollers and with your machine set to the widest width start cranking your dough through. Repeat this step 2 or 3 times at that width dusting with flour as necessary and then reduce the roller width one setting. Carry on rolling and dusting as necessary until you have a nice thin sheet of dough roughly 3 mm thick.
Next switch your handle to the noodle cutting rollers and feed your sheet of dough through the fettucine roller from start to finish. That's it! You now have a handful of fresh fettucine noodles to dry!
I don't have a fancy place to hang my fresh noodles so I use the railing of our stairs covered with tea towels that have been dusted with flour so the noodles won't stick as they dry. Let them dry completely if you want to store them or if you plan to eat them for dinner right away let them hang there about 15 minutes before cooking them. They cook up really quickly! I usually boil them 5-6 minutes but if you like yours a little more al dente I'd cut the cooking time by a couple of minutes :)
Everyone just raved over our noodles so I can't wait to make them again! If you have fussy eaters this is a fabulous way to get them to eat their broccoli without even knowing it as the noodle doesn't actually taste like broccoli at all. It just gives it the lovely green color and the basil that I added gave the noodles a deliciously sweet basil taste. Mmmm so good *grin*.
It makes roughly 1 pound of pasta and it was the perfect amount for all 6 of us with our garlic toast :)
Bon appetit!
~ Rosina
