PASTA CARBONARA

 

Can't remember the last time I made homemade pasta. Reminiscing with CA about the pasta carbonara we've enjoyed in France--hot pasta nests served with a raw egg yolk in the center--led me to Inspired Taste's recipe. Delicious.

Not a difficult recipe, but timing is of the essence. You want to make sure the pasta mixture is hot enough to cook each individual plate's raw egg. We used four slices of Nueske's bacon and had some steamed sweet peas as a side dish.

When thinking through this recipe earlier today, I decided only homemade pasta was worthy. We were rather piggish tonight, and managed to eat the whole recipe of linguine.


Basic Pasta Dough

1-1/2 Cups Flour
2 xl  Eggs
1/2 tsp. Salt
1 T. Oil
1 tsp. Water

1. Heap flour and salt into the center of a floured board; make a large indentation in the center of the heap.
2. Crack the eggs into the flour well; add the oil and water.
3. Blend together with pastry scraper (scraping from outside-in on all four sides) until well mixed. Continue blending with fingers until dough comes together.
4. Gently knead until dough smooths a bit; cut into two pieces; cover one-half with plastic wrap and shape the other into a rectangle that is approximately 3" x 5".
5. Feed short end of dough rectangle through pasta rollers at the widest setting (#1 on my machine). Refold dough into same sized rectangle and repeat process until dough is smooth. Then, continue rolling dough through each numbered setting (#2 through #5; skip #6).
6. Repeat process with second half of dough.
7. Let dough strips rest and dry a bit.
8. Cut each length into three pieces and run all six lengths through a pasta cutter--linguine or fettuccine widths.