My Homemade Fresh Pasta Fiasco

Most of the time, I love to cook. And I love the DIY aspects of cooking that make me think of cooking as a craft. As a result, I like to cook from scratch.

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Marcato’s Atlas 150 Handcranked Pasta Machine

My belated birthday present from Jeff was a pasta machine, the Atlas 150 from Marcato, their original pasta making machine. It comes in anodized aluminum in several colors or the chrome steel model that I chose. I think Jeff bought mine on Amazon.

My friend Luciana who is a freelance chef in Rome works as an ambassador for Marcato, demonstrating their pasta machines in department stores and on videos. Here she has a cameo in a video for a more advanced machine, the Otello!

Basic Pasta Dough Recipe

Because this was the first time I had ever made pasta, I decided to follow the basic pasta recipe in the Marcato manual. Fortunately, I had the ingredients on hand: 250 g 00 flour, 250 g semolina flour and five eggs. That was it.

Trying to Make the Pasta

The manual said to put the flours on a work surface and make a well in the center. OK so far. But I didn’t make the well quite big enough to hold five eggs. I was supposed to gently beat the eggs to break the yolks and combine a little flour at a time till it was all incorporated. Because the eggs spilled over the top of my flour mountain, I just tried to incorporate the yolks and whites as best I could with my hands. What a mess. It produced a very sticky dough. I added a little water because, though the dough was sticky, it felt dry. I cleaned off my hands and got a fork to help make a solid ball that I flattened into a disc.

Next, I covered the dough with plastic wrap, and let it rest on the counter for about an hour while I worked on the challah that I was also making.

At the end of an hour, I cut the disc into four pieces. I chose one to work with, and covered the other three with plastic wrap so they wouldn’t dry out.

Rolling out dough isn’t my strong suit, unfortunately. I was supposed to roll the dough into a rectangle that would fit in the machine. My rolling was a little wonky, but I was able to use it in the machine. I started out with the roller opening on 0, the widest setting. I cranked the dough through the rollers. Then I turned the dial to 1, a little narrower, and cranked the dough through. Next, set the dial to 3, and cranked it through. Finally, I set it to 6, much narrower, and cranked the dough through. At that point, it was very, very thin. It seemed too thin, and the dough ripped in a couple of places. I cut the ripped dough off and worked with what was left.

My Atlas 150 makes three kinds of pasta:

• lasagna
• fettuccine
• taglioni (a very thin, delicate pasta that looks to me like angel hair pasta)

I can buy accessories (other blades) that make different types of pasta. But before I do that, I need to master these three first. 🙂

I decided to make fettuccine. It seemed like a good bet for my first foray into making pasta with a hand cranked machine. I put the thin dough through the fettuccine blade, and it produced fettuccine! But the strands stuck together, unfortunately, as they folded themselves onto the bottom of the machine as they came out of the blades.

Sadly, the manual doesn’t give the novice much instruction on exactly what to do. So I tried to find a video of Lidia Bastianich, the TV chef and restauranteur, making pasta. I had seen it on TV a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn’t find it. Nevertheless, I seemed to remember her flouring her workspace as well as the pasta dough. So I tried that. I thought it helped.

But I didn’t have a real plan for what to do with the dough once it was cut into fettuccine. I don’t have a pasta drying rack. I had a cotton dishtowel that I sprinkled with water to make it damp, and I sprinkled a little more flour on it too. I started out by laying the individual strands on the towel, but I quickly used up the space on the first towel and my countertop space. 

Then I remembered Lidia making little “nests” with the strands, so I did that.

I worked through all of the dough, and I ended up with a lot of fettuccine, and quite a few little nests on damp, floured towels. 

Cooking the Pasta

I boiled the water, and was excited to cook my fettuccine.

But when I took out each of the little nests of fettuccine to add it to the boiling water, the strands kind of melded into each other. Ugh. I couldn’t separate most of the strands. I tried putting each of the nests, one at a time, into the boiling water, and I tried to separate the strands with my pasta fork, but it didn’t really work.

Disaster. Fiasco. Failure.

I managed to save enough independent strands of fettuccine that there was enough for Jeff and me to eat as a side dish for our dinner.

But to make matters worse, the couple of small blocks of parmigiano reggiano that I had in the cheese drawer of my fridge were either dried out or growing mold. Same with the pecorino romano. I had no Italian cheese that I could use. I ended up grating French Camembert and used that with a little olive oil.

Oh Well!

The fettuccine was edible, but it wasn’t good. Because I was worried about the dough ripping, I didn’t make it thin enough. So, it was too thick.

Jeff asked me what I thought, and I said it was terrible. He said it wasn’t terrible, but a step better than terrible. We couldn’t think of the right descriptor, lol.

So I need to learn the fundamentals of pasta making. I welcome any advice or help from any of you who know how to make fresh pasta that doesn’t stick together and doesn’t develop holes in the dough when you put it through the slimmest setting. 

But I don’t want to give up. I just found the directions on the Marcato website (though they are not quite complete), and I am off to watch pasta making videos on the Marcato website and on YouTube, or to buy a book on pasta making!

Allison Cohen

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