How to make pasta {a bucket list addition}

Did you know, that making your own pasta is actually super easy?! (Ok, if you have the right and proper machine. But given that it is super duper easy!!).
I spent a lot of time at my friends grandparents place recently and the whole family is obsessed with good food! Not in a crazy way, more in a really sophisticated, we-really-appreciate-good-food-way. I ate so good,  luckily I lost about two kilos while studying the month before, or I would have been a cute little stuffed piece of pasta myself.
Anyway, they don't juts eat good, they also cook and bake amazingly well, so one evening we made pasta.
People who know me better (or have read this little blog for a while) know how excited I get about everything food related. So reading and talking about all the different stuffing's we were considering putting into our ravioli...I probably would have already been satisfied doing just that.

But before we get too elaborated and into my crazy food-talk-obsession here, let's get back to the basic. The dough.
I was a little bit nervous when I ended up being the one tending to the dough and the machine (you know when you want to impress someone and you're more like "Whups,...never did this before. I guess we can cross out the impressing and just hope I don't end this in some embarrassing disastrous way!!??". That's where we were). And the dough after all, is the one crucial thing to good pasta (yeah I know. Quite obvious. So, can you feel the pressure already!?)

At the end it was just fun! (And a really good workout). So let's get started!!
For the dough you'll need:

• 500gr flour (Typo 00 which is super important!!!)
• 3 large eggs 
• and 2 yolks
• a pinch of salt
• water for your finger tips

(Ok I hope I remembered it all right). I also did a little bit of research and just as usual, there are tons of different ways to make it. Use 6 eggs, 4 and 2 yolks, five...and so on. This is the one we used however.

Now, let's talk kneading:

1. Built a little flour mountain. (This is probably the most fun part of the whole thing for me. It's like you get to be a kid again, building sand castles. And than everything gets awesome and messy. But maybe that's just me....yeah probably)
2. Add the "mess". Aka eggs, yolks and salt.
3. Now gently fold in the surrounding flour with your fingertips and start kneading.
4. Occasionally dip your finger tips into the water and keep kneading! It will be a hard piece of work and probably seem impossible but you'll get there eventually. 

The book said to only dip your fingertips into the water (which meant: Don't add unnecessary liquid), though at the end we ended up adding quite a bit more liquid (which meant we kept dipping or fingertips into water quite often ;)) as usual in the kitchen: Just go with your guts.

Also, talking to my friends grandma while getting started, I totally forgot to add the yolks until a bit later....(cough. Talk about wanting to impress. She pretended just fine that she didn't see how I added them sheepishly later on. Thanks grandma!!).

Let the dough rest for an hour (at least) under a bowl (turned up side down).

And know you'll need the machine.

Start with the largest gap of the pasta machine and work towards the finest.
Start with a small piece, which you flatten with your fingers. Pull it through, fold it, pull it through again. When you go one way towards "finer", don't fold the pasta the first time you pull it through. Repeat ;)
I'm the officially (well, officially self-announced) pasta master now ;)

And that's about it! Now you can cut them into stripes, make lasagna with it or like, in our case, fill them with something delicious and make Ravioli! Nomnomnomnom!

(And this post got labelled "Bucket list" on a thought, because it seemed appropriate to put "Make your own pasta" on my bucket list!! ;) )

Also, I didn't take a single picture!! Bummer. I guess it was just too good to wait a single second longer until we could finally dig in. But, a friend of mine sent me his self-made pasta dinner the other day which used about the same technique and our second dinner looked pretty close to that. So you'll have to do with that ;)

To my friend: Sorry and thanks for letting me steal your picture, I hope that was ok  ;P

Have fun getting your kitchen all covered in flour!!!