Making Pasta - Part II

The pasta dough is then cut into pieces, flattened and passed through the rollers on the widest level initially to begin stretching the dough. It takes about six passes for each piece of dough to achieve these beautiful silky sheets! And each time we make it, the dough is always just a little bit different. Hot & humid conditions will produce a much different dough than cool and dry. It becomes quite the production line to get all sheets turned out. Dee and I have made pasta so much together that we just get into a rhythm and we crank these sheets out pretty fast! Depending on the wetness of the dough, flouring the pasta sheets is an important step as they get thinner and thinner. In the pictures below, the dough on the left is plain pasta and spinach pasta is on the right. Dee just had her nails done and didn't mind posing for the camera! Every time we roll out the dough, we are always in awe and at the beautiful silky long pasta sheets that we create. Tyler Florence of Tyler's Ultimate did an amazing show on lasagna with some very unique ways of creating some incredible dishes using pasta sheets. Once we have all the pasta sheets rolled out, the last and final step is deciding to roll the sheets into spaghetti or fettuccini. The spinach dough usually turn out better as fettuccini since it has a more fiber in the sheets with the addition of purred spinach. Additionally, rolling out the dough with a rolling pin is another option when you need sheets for making something like manicotti.
We usually have some type of fresh pasta dish on pasta making day. One of the greatest pleasures is deciding what kinda of sauce we are going to have that night for dinner since it is such a treat to have fresh pasta as it is oh so delicious!