Let's Make some Pasta!

Emily's sacramental preparation homework had us make unleavened bread to illustrate what the Jewish people ate during their flight from Egypt. Unleavened bread has no yeast so the preparation and cooking time is much less because you don't have to wait for the dough to rise. In an earlier blog post we made the pretzels to demonstrate the longer process of making leavened bread. Since Chris is Italian, he thought the unleavened bread project would be a great opportunity to make homemade pasta... like his grandmother used to do. The kids thought this was a great idea too! As official photographer and family blogger, I documented the event very carefully for future memories.

Pasta is made from flour, eggs and a little bit of water. You can see our pasta chefs are ready to go. We got our pasta machine shortly before Emily was born and have used it only a few times. My very ambitious husband made homemade pasta for the reception at our house following David's baptism. I wish I had a picture of that... it was crazy. He made so much pasta that he had it hanging to dry in our kitchen on clothes hangers from all the cabinets. His plan was to make a sampling of pasta this time. Anyway, here they are... ready to go! "Let's make some Pasta!"

So, you start by putting a little bit of dough in the machine and cranking the handle to "knead" it.

You pass the dough through the pasta machine 6 times which makes progressively thinner and thinner pasta. Six passes also allows for the kiddos to get lots of turns cranking the machine. Chris says it is very helpful to have the extra hands doing the cranking so his can be free to guide the pasta. Apparently, pasta making is tricky all by yourself. If you don't keep it straight, it tends to crumple... which can be frustrating.

Here is what the final sheet of pasta looks like after six passes through the machine. Pretty impressive, eh?

The sheets have to dry for about 10 minutes before you can cut them.

Here is the really impressive long sheet of pasta! The kids liked this a lot.

And here they are cutting the sheet into spaghetti. This reminded David of his favorite playdough attachement...

Look at all that pasta!

And more pasta!

And even more pasta!

In the end, we boiled our spaghetti for about five minutes and it was delicious! Emily wanted to know if we could stop buying pasta at the store and just make it from scratch every time! Good family fun, eh?