**Mastering Italian Pasta: A Journey from Scratch**

When it comes to making pasta, few techniques are as essential as mastering the art of creating the perfect dough. In this article, we'll explore the process of making Italian pasta from scratch, including how to create a delicious and supple master egg pasta dough.

**The Importance of Hydration**

To start, we need to understand the importance of hydration in making pasta dough. When you're working with flour, it's essential to keep your ingredients hydrated. This means adding the right amount of water to the flour to create a smooth, pliable dough that will hold its shape and yield a delicious final product.

For this recipe, we'll let our dough sit for two to three hours in the refrigerator to allow the gluten to relax. This process is called "resting" or "proofing," and it's essential for developing the dough's texture and structure. By letting the dough sit overnight, you can achieve a truly exceptional level of hydration, resulting in a soft, supple pasta that's perfect for a variety of sauces.

**The Result: Soft, Supple Pasta**

When we check on our dough after its resting period, we're greeted with an incredibly soft and supple texture. The dough is no longer bouncy but has become smooth and pliable, almost like butter. This is the mark of a perfectly hydrated dough, and it's essential for creating pasta that will hold its shape and yield to the sauce.

By opening up our dough, we can see the air pockets that have formed during the resting process. These air bubbles are a sign that the gluten has fully relaxed, allowing the dough to become soft and supple. Kneading the dough into this state is crucial for developing the texture and structure of the pasta.

**The Master Egg Pasta Dough**

Our master egg pasta dough is now ready to be used in a variety of recipes. This type of dough is perfect for making tagliatelle, fettuccine, and other shapes that require a delicate balance of texture and flavor. The eggs add richness and moisture to the dough, making it ideal for creating pasta that will hold its shape and yield to the sauce.

**Rolling Out the Fettuccine**

To make a delicious fettuccine alfredo, we need to roll out our pasta dough into thin sheets using a pasta machine. The pasta machine is an essential tool in any serious home cook's kitchen, as it allows you to achieve perfectly uniform noodles with ease.

Starting at the lowest setting on the pasta machine, we'll gradually work our way up through the different settings to achieve the desired thickness and texture for our fettuccine. We'll add a tiny bit of flour to help the dough glide smoothly through the machine, ensuring that we don't overwork the pasta.

**Cooking the Fettuccine**

Once we've rolled out our pasta, it's time to cook it. Simply drop the noodles into a pot of boiling salted water and cook for 3-4 minutes, or until they're al dente. To make a creamy fettuccine alfredo sauce, we'll melt butter in a pan over low heat, then add grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese to create a rich and indulgent sauce.

Reserving some of the pasta water before draining the noodles, we can use this liquid to emulsify with the butter and create a smooth, creamy sauce. By adding the reserved pasta water to the pan, we'll be able to achieve a silky, velvety texture that coats the noodles perfectly.

**The Joy of Cooking Pasta**

Cooking pasta is a joy in itself, as it allows you to connect with your ingredients and create something truly delicious from scratch. When you master the art of making Italian pasta, you open yourself up to a world of culinary possibilities.

Whether you're cooking for one or for a crowd, fresh pasta will always elevate your dish to new heights. So don't be afraid to experiment and try new things – with practice and patience, you'll soon be creating pasta that's worthy of the masters.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmark fetchery great chef out of philadelphia in his cookbook mastering pasta he writes a recipe doesn't just work or not work the cook makes a recipe work that is the most important thing you have to understand when making pasta or doughs or any recipe for that matter in the end it's on you to execute the recipe correctly to your tastes because a book ain't eating the food you are with that in mind let's jump right into it made in gnocchi we've made orchetti with semolina and water dough today we're gonna make egg dough to be good at pasta you have to be a student of pasta that means you have to learn from people who've learned from masters and these are some of the masters that i learned from this is the pasta book we made oreketi from this is from evan funke along with mark vetry the two have very different approaches to an egg dough so today we're gonna make evan's recipe it's simpler mark has a bit more going on in it but it's a different approach so i'm gonna put the recipe right here and we're gonna measure it out but the measuring is not so important you have to think of it as a variable if you make this in the summer versus the winter you may need more moisture or it may be a little bit dry like my skin is dry as hell that's telling me that the proportions in here might need to be tweaked so as long as you understand that it's not about the recipe i write a recipe or when i follow somebody else's recipe i'm taking that as a loose guideline and i know that there may be problems that come across that i'm gonna have to use my culinary judgment and experience to solve on the spot for the flour we're going with this italian organic double zero flour which is a much finer ground flour than all purpose we're gonna go with one pound or 454 grams we're going to measure out 258 grams of whole egg now using the grandma egg cracking method i know a lot of people like to only use egg yolks which is fine but whole eggs are great the yolks give the elasticity and the whites give the structure sift some flour onto the board and create a deep well out of the flour with high walls and then pour in the beaten egg using a fork gently pull flour from the wall of flour a little bit at a time carefully working it into the egg until the egg resembles pancake batter consistency the egg will now be stable enough to start to fold in the flour with a bench scraper until the dough ball forms and you can begin to knead the dough this is where you need to start to understand humidity levels in your environment and gain a feel as to when your dough doesn't want to take any more flour and then just work it till it forms a dough ball as you need the dough will start to pick up any flour on the board which of course is what we want but i know it's dryer today and i know it's easier to add flour to a dough than it is to take it away so don't feel like you need to incorporate all of the flour into the dough before you start kneading if you feel the dough has enough flour start to scrape that flour off the board and sift out any dry bits and keep that on the side and use as needed as you can see there's a little bit of flour still on the board i'm going to use that to show you how the dough picks it up as you need it you want to keep that in mind because if you're needing dough and you have lots of flour on the board it can go from perfectly hydrated to dry in no time so you have to keep that in mind and as you can see as i'm kneading it it's picking up some of that flour off that board now let's talk about a couple kneading techniques the idea is to take one hand and fold the dough onto itself and with the same hand push it away from you using your palm then with the other hand you're just rotating it about a quarter turn and you're just gonna keep repeating that over and over again for about three to five minutes alternatively you can use what is referred to as the grandma method where the same idea is in play you're just using both your hands folding the dough onto itself all with the idea of building gluten and folding air into the dough to make it really nice and supple and delicious after about five minutes of kneading it should look like a slightly tacky dough and i have this little crease on the bottom end that i want to seal and i can do so with a little squirt bottle now wrap it in plastic wrap evan has a whole method for wrapping the dough in plastic with all these little pleats that prevent any hard edges from forming as it rests this is really important only if you're gonna roll out the dough into a single sheet with a mozzarella or rolling pin but i like to do it regardless then just let it rest on the counter for 15 minutes goal for it is to be the perfect balance between elasticity and extensibility so if it's too elastic then it's not going to be easy to roll out it's going to snap back into place and it's going to be on the tougher side but if it's too elastic it won't ever hold its shape and obviously gluten development is an important part of this and there's really two ways to do it one is by kneading which we just did and then another one is with time so by alternating the two we don't have to work as hard to knead it for like 15 minutes straight we can knead it for five minutes which is what we just did we got it to this point which is a good point we're gonna let it rest for 15 minutes that's going to help relax it even more make it even easier for us to knead working more air into the dough and gluten and getting it to another phase so like could you just take this and make pasta sure but if you're gonna go the extra mile to make your own pasta i like to follow a method that is sort of proven i know evan funky's methods are comes out really fantastic if you just give it the time and the love that it deserves so 15 minutes rested in plastic and we're back at it you can see the humidity in the plastic which is helping the dough hydrate as it rests you'll start to see a little sheen to the dough that's a good sign that there's gluten starting to develop now is when i'm gonna start to really feel the dough and try to understand what it's going through and as i'm kneading it i'm feeling it's a bit hard and it's beginning to feel a bit dry so there's a few things you could do you could wet your hands and then continue to knead it gradually working more moisture into the dough or you can use that spray bottle maybe you're in a humid environment rather than a dry environment like me so you might have a dough that's too tacky in which case you might want to add a little bit of flour at this point so that's where the judgment starts to come to play then just proceed with another round of three to five minutes of kneading and then wrap it again in plastic and let it rest on the counter for another 15 minutes now you can tell after the second round of kneading the dough has a totally different look than it did before 15 minutes later we're ready for another round of kneading the dough should have some bounce back when you poke it as you can see it's just so much more hydrated two rounds of the kneading should be enough but i'm gonna go for another quick round because to me it just feels like it could use a little bit more kneading you see the look of this dough that is the look that i want my dough to have you can definitely underneath dough but you can't really over knead it so when in doubt just need a little bit more now we're just going to wrap it up in plastic one more time and it's going to rest overnight in the fridge you don't really need to wrap the dough like that his thought process behind it is to create no hard edges around it so that when he rolls out a sheet it's perfectly circular again if you're using a pasta machine you don't have to worry so much about that but i just like working through the mindset of somebody who thinks like that and understanding why they did it it's gonna go in the refrigerator for about two to three hours and i'm telling you you could use it right now but to get it at that optimal balance of elasticity and extensibility we're gonna let it sit in the refrigerator for two to three hours at a minimum and up to overnight which i may in fact do so we'll check back in when it's ready now this is what you're gonna get if you let this sit overnight in the refrigerator this incredibly soft supple dough it's still bouncy but it's much softer it's hydrated we can open it up it's basically everything you want a pasta dough to look like and feel like if you did your job right you can actually see the air pockets you knead it into the dough that's a sign you did a good job now this is your master egg pasta dough you'll make taglitelli out of this in parpa deli and you'll use rich meat sauces on it and it's elastic so it's great for filled pasta so raviolis tortellinis all the stuff like that and of course you can make most other shapes with it too but generally pastas are matched to sauces and this is emblematic of the north where they had a little bit more money and they could afford the eggs whereas in the south where they use semolina and just water you can see there's sort of an economic reason for why certain parts of italy do the things they do now i'm gonna wrap up one of these sides i'm gonna roll out a little bit of fettuccine we're gonna make a little bit of fresh pasta with uh like an alfredo butter parmesan sauce covered that on the show i'll leave a link down below run through it real quick i'm just gonna cut the dough into quarters and we're gonna roll out a quarter of the dough at a time in the pasta machine get a tiny bit of flour onto the pasta roller but you don't want a lot if it's properly hydrated you're really not going to need the flour to roll it out start at the lowest setting and then you work your way up i'm just going to kind of push it into a little bit of a rectangle or square just so it sort of mimics the final shape i'm looking for so now just run it through the widest setting and then fold it in thirds on top of each other that sort of helps to keep that nice shape as well as add a bit more structure to the dough one more time drop it down to one pop it down to two pop it down to three then to four to five you can see it's sort of those air bubbles that we worked in it's a really beautiful dough now we're gonna go to the last one which is six which is gonna give us more of a fettuccine if we went to seven that's gonna give us a thinner more italiantelly noodle square off the edges and cut the sheet in half so we're just gonna run it through the tagliatelle setting now we're just going to make a little fettuccine alfredo we're going to grate up some parmigiano-reggiano on the finest setting of the box grater we're going to cut up about a half stick of butter get a small pot of boiling water heavily salted there's no salt in the pasta so all the salt is going to be in the water then we just want to get a pan on really low heat we kind of just want to get the pan warm we don't want to get too hot now drop the pasta and you can cook that for about three minutes fresh pasta is actually more forgiving than dried pasta so like there's less of a chance of you missing al dente so after about three minutes of cooking you want to transfer the fettuccine to the butter reserving the pasta water and using that to emulsify with the butter to make the sauce cook for a minute or so on low heat and then kill the heat and you want to toss in some parmigiano-reggiano until it melts into the sauce and gets nice and creamy coats the noodles and it's ready to serve something i always forget to tell you when making pasta is that always serve it in a warm dish cold dish is gonna cool pasta down way too fast where a warm dish is gonna keep the pasta nice and warm and flowing hear that sound i'm gonna make love to this bowl of pasta real quick so at the end of the day this recipe is gonna yield you a really good dough but it's on you to figure it out you've gotta get to know the dough get acquainted with it become friends with it practice do this few times and you'll get it and once you nail it you're gonna be making some of the best pasta i promise you it's a skill worth mastering thank you all for watching that's all that i have today i'll see you all next time until then take care of yourself and go feed yourselfmark fetchery great chef out of philadelphia in his cookbook mastering pasta he writes a recipe doesn't just work or not work the cook makes a recipe work that is the most important thing you have to understand when making pasta or doughs or any recipe for that matter in the end it's on you to execute the recipe correctly to your tastes because a book ain't eating the food you are with that in mind let's jump right into it made in gnocchi we've made orchetti with semolina and water dough today we're gonna make egg dough to be good at pasta you have to be a student of pasta that means you have to learn from people who've learned from masters and these are some of the masters that i learned from this is the pasta book we made oreketi from this is from evan funke along with mark vetry the two have very different approaches to an egg dough so today we're gonna make evan's recipe it's simpler mark has a bit more going on in it but it's a different approach so i'm gonna put the recipe right here and we're gonna measure it out but the measuring is not so important you have to think of it as a variable if you make this in the summer versus the winter you may need more moisture or it may be a little bit dry like my skin is dry as hell that's telling me that the proportions in here might need to be tweaked so as long as you understand that it's not about the recipe i write a recipe or when i follow somebody else's recipe i'm taking that as a loose guideline and i know that there may be problems that come across that i'm gonna have to use my culinary judgment and experience to solve on the spot for the flour we're going with this italian organic double zero flour which is a much finer ground flour than all purpose we're gonna go with one pound or 454 grams we're going to measure out 258 grams of whole egg now using the grandma egg cracking method i know a lot of people like to only use egg yolks which is fine but whole eggs are great the yolks give the elasticity and the whites give the structure sift some flour onto the board and create a deep well out of the flour with high walls and then pour in the beaten egg using a fork gently pull flour from the wall of flour a little bit at a time carefully working it into the egg until the egg resembles pancake batter consistency the egg will now be stable enough to start to fold in the flour with a bench scraper until the dough ball forms and you can begin to knead the dough this is where you need to start to understand humidity levels in your environment and gain a feel as to when your dough doesn't want to take any more flour and then just work it till it forms a dough ball as you need the dough will start to pick up any flour on the board which of course is what we want but i know it's dryer today and i know it's easier to add flour to a dough than it is to take it away so don't feel like you need to incorporate all of the flour into the dough before you start kneading if you feel the dough has enough flour start to scrape that flour off the board and sift out any dry bits and keep that on the side and use as needed as you can see there's a little bit of flour still on the board i'm going to use that to show you how the dough picks it up as you need it you want to keep that in mind because if you're needing dough and you have lots of flour on the board it can go from perfectly hydrated to dry in no time so you have to keep that in mind and as you can see as i'm kneading it it's picking up some of that flour off that board now let's talk about a couple kneading techniques the idea is to take one hand and fold the dough onto itself and with the same hand push it away from you using your palm then with the other hand you're just rotating it about a quarter turn and you're just gonna keep repeating that over and over again for about three to five minutes alternatively you can use what is referred to as the grandma method where the same idea is in play you're just using both your hands folding the dough onto itself all with the idea of building gluten and folding air into the dough to make it really nice and supple and delicious after about five minutes of kneading it should look like a slightly tacky dough and i have this little crease on the bottom end that i want to seal and i can do so with a little squirt bottle now wrap it in plastic wrap evan has a whole method for wrapping the dough in plastic with all these little pleats that prevent any hard edges from forming as it rests this is really important only if you're gonna roll out the dough into a single sheet with a mozzarella or rolling pin but i like to do it regardless then just let it rest on the counter for 15 minutes goal for it is to be the perfect balance between elasticity and extensibility so if it's too elastic then it's not going to be easy to roll out it's going to snap back into place and it's going to be on the tougher side but if it's too elastic it won't ever hold its shape and obviously gluten development is an important part of this and there's really two ways to do it one is by kneading which we just did and then another one is with time so by alternating the two we don't have to work as hard to knead it for like 15 minutes straight we can knead it for five minutes which is what we just did we got it to this point which is a good point we're gonna let it rest for 15 minutes that's going to help relax it even more make it even easier for us to knead working more air into the dough and gluten and getting it to another phase so like could you just take this and make pasta sure but if you're gonna go the extra mile to make your own pasta i like to follow a method that is sort of proven i know evan funky's methods are comes out really fantastic if you just give it the time and the love that it deserves so 15 minutes rested in plastic and we're back at it you can see the humidity in the plastic which is helping the dough hydrate as it rests you'll start to see a little sheen to the dough that's a good sign that there's gluten starting to develop now is when i'm gonna start to really feel the dough and try to understand what it's going through and as i'm kneading it i'm feeling it's a bit hard and it's beginning to feel a bit dry so there's a few things you could do you could wet your hands and then continue to knead it gradually working more moisture into the dough or you can use that spray bottle maybe you're in a humid environment rather than a dry environment like me so you might have a dough that's too tacky in which case you might want to add a little bit of flour at this point so that's where the judgment starts to come to play then just proceed with another round of three to five minutes of kneading and then wrap it again in plastic and let it rest on the counter for another 15 minutes now you can tell after the second round of kneading the dough has a totally different look than it did before 15 minutes later we're ready for another round of kneading the dough should have some bounce back when you poke it as you can see it's just so much more hydrated two rounds of the kneading should be enough but i'm gonna go for another quick round because to me it just feels like it could use a little bit more kneading you see the look of this dough that is the look that i want my dough to have you can definitely underneath dough but you can't really over knead it so when in doubt just need a little bit more now we're just going to wrap it up in plastic one more time and it's going to rest overnight in the fridge you don't really need to wrap the dough like that his thought process behind it is to create no hard edges around it so that when he rolls out a sheet it's perfectly circular again if you're using a pasta machine you don't have to worry so much about that but i just like working through the mindset of somebody who thinks like that and understanding why they did it it's gonna go in the refrigerator for about two to three hours and i'm telling you you could use it right now but to get it at that optimal balance of elasticity and extensibility we're gonna let it sit in the refrigerator for two to three hours at a minimum and up to overnight which i may in fact do so we'll check back in when it's ready now this is what you're gonna get if you let this sit overnight in the refrigerator this incredibly soft supple dough it's still bouncy but it's much softer it's hydrated we can open it up it's basically everything you want a pasta dough to look like and feel like if you did your job right you can actually see the air pockets you knead it into the dough that's a sign you did a good job now this is your master egg pasta dough you'll make taglitelli out of this in parpa deli and you'll use rich meat sauces on it and it's elastic so it's great for filled pasta so raviolis tortellinis all the stuff like that and of course you can make most other shapes with it too but generally pastas are matched to sauces and this is emblematic of the north where they had a little bit more money and they could afford the eggs whereas in the south where they use semolina and just water you can see there's sort of an economic reason for why certain parts of italy do the things they do now i'm gonna wrap up one of these sides i'm gonna roll out a little bit of fettuccine we're gonna make a little bit of fresh pasta with uh like an alfredo butter parmesan sauce covered that on the show i'll leave a link down below run through it real quick i'm just gonna cut the dough into quarters and we're gonna roll out a quarter of the dough at a time in the pasta machine get a tiny bit of flour onto the pasta roller but you don't want a lot if it's properly hydrated you're really not going to need the flour to roll it out start at the lowest setting and then you work your way up i'm just going to kind of push it into a little bit of a rectangle or square just so it sort of mimics the final shape i'm looking for so now just run it through the widest setting and then fold it in thirds on top of each other that sort of helps to keep that nice shape as well as add a bit more structure to the dough one more time drop it down to one pop it down to two pop it down to three then to four to five you can see it's sort of those air bubbles that we worked in it's a really beautiful dough now we're gonna go to the last one which is six which is gonna give us more of a fettuccine if we went to seven that's gonna give us a thinner more italiantelly noodle square off the edges and cut the sheet in half so we're just gonna run it through the tagliatelle setting now we're just going to make a little fettuccine alfredo we're going to grate up some parmigiano-reggiano on the finest setting of the box grater we're going to cut up about a half stick of butter get a small pot of boiling water heavily salted there's no salt in the pasta so all the salt is going to be in the water then we just want to get a pan on really low heat we kind of just want to get the pan warm we don't want to get too hot now drop the pasta and you can cook that for about three minutes fresh pasta is actually more forgiving than dried pasta so like there's less of a chance of you missing al dente so after about three minutes of cooking you want to transfer the fettuccine to the butter reserving the pasta water and using that to emulsify with the butter to make the sauce cook for a minute or so on low heat and then kill the heat and you want to toss in some parmigiano-reggiano until it melts into the sauce and gets nice and creamy coats the noodles and it's ready to serve something i always forget to tell you when making pasta is that always serve it in a warm dish cold dish is gonna cool pasta down way too fast where a warm dish is gonna keep the pasta nice and warm and flowing hear that sound i'm gonna make love to this bowl of pasta real quick so at the end of the day this recipe is gonna yield you a really good dough but it's on you to figure it out you've gotta get to know the dough get acquainted with it become friends with it practice do this few times and you'll get it and once you nail it you're gonna be making some of the best pasta i promise you it's a skill worth mastering thank you all for watching that's all that i have today i'll see you all next time until then take care of yourself and go feed yourself\n"