Here is the basic pasta recipe we used:

3 1/2 cups sifted flour
5 eggs
1 tsp salt
1 tsp olive oil

We decided that we wanted to make about 20 gifts worth of pasta, with 3 bundles of different flavored pasta in each gift. We also wanted to make some attractive packaging so that each gift was something like a pasta kit or set. When making the pasta, a good size piece of dough to work with is 1/4 of a recipe, and when rolled out, cut, and wrapped, this would make one bundle or 1/3 or a pasta kit.

So we calculated that we would need to make about 15 recipes of pasta. If you have ever made pasta yourself, you will know that it is not incredibly difficult but it does take a bit of work; the dough is time consuming to mix and it takes encouraging to coalesce into a dough ball, and since it is extremely stiff it is tiring to knead it.

Rolling out the pasta also takes a fair amount of work. We had a hand cranked pasta machine, but with 15 recipes, there would be 60 pieces of dough to roll out. Each piece of dough takes about 20 passes through the machine to process, and a processing pass takes maybe 10 cranks on average. Thus we would have to form 25 pounds of dough and turn that hand crank ~12,000 times to make our christmas gifts. Seeing as how this would have left our hands as nothing but bloody stumps, we decided to invest in some machinery.

Becky ordered us a refurbished 6 qt kitchenaid mixer off of ebay, and also ordered the pasta extruding attachment. This mixer is awesome. It is heavy, the attachments are beefy, and it has a motor that sucks nearly 500 watts. Serious stuff for a couple noodles.

Meanwhile, we had read that extruded pasta didn't dry as well as rolled pasta, and that it also wasn't as tasty. When the equipment had arrived and it was time to start working on the kits, we made one batch of pasta processed different ways and staged a blind taste test to decide if these statements were true or just a bunch of pasta-snob bunk.

1/4 - extruded
1/4 - extruded twice
1/4 - rolled a few times, then extruded
1/4 - fully rolled
Thinking it was the working of the dough that made the rolled pasta better (purportedly), we thought extruding twice or rolling a few times and then extruding would provide some extra working of the dough over the single extruded method and thus might improve quality.

While all the extruded versions tasted great, the fully rolled pasta tasted noticeably better. The texture was more smooth and cohesive, and the edges were less ragged. It felt more delicate, yet more fully formed in the mouth. Not wanting to expose the gift recipients to anything less than the highest quality pasta, we though rolling was definitely the way to go. Another consideration was that the pasta tended to stick together when extruding since the pasta needed to be fairly moist for extruding and required too much time to separate each 30cm of noodle individually.

Faced with the prospect of turning the hand crank 12,000 times, we immediately went to the local kitchen store and picked up the pasta rolling attachments for the kitchenaid. Roughly figuring our ingredient needs, we stocked up on organic flour (20lbs), 7 dozen free range chicken eggs, organic basil, organic rosemary, and organic spinach. Along with our new equipment and the data gathered during our test batch, we were ready to go.

Pasta Ingredients and Equipment

The kitchenaid was an incredible aid in mixing and forming the dough. The 6qt mixer can handle a double batch of ingredients. We just put the ingredients in, mix with the paddle blade on the lowest speed for less than a minute until the motor starts to labor greatly, then replace the blade with the dough hook and knead at the lowest speed for a couple of minutes until the motor again nearly stalls. This gets the dough mixed and formed up into a dough ball.

Becky Measuring Ingredients

Into the Mixer

Kneading seems to have given me the crazy eye

Once the dough is kneaded, it is cut apart into 1/4 recipe chunks and let to rest for at least 15 minutes.

Only 52 more of these to make and roll...

Next the pasta is extruded or rolled; in our case we wanted to roll. The dough chunk is rolled many times on the widest roller setting, flouring if necessary, until it is silky smooth and uniform. For us this takes 15-20 times through the rolls, folding the dough in half before each rolling..

The first time...

Is free

After getting the dough worked properly on the widest setting, the dough is rolled thinner and thinner by passing it through the rolls once on each width and progressively narrowing the gap between the rolls. This is done by changing the setting on the roller attachment. We rolled these noodles out to setting 6.

Its so smooth

and silky

Once the dough is fully rolled out into a sheet, the sheet is set out to dry until the edges start cracking. At first, we cut the sheets into noodles immediately after rolling, but we found that if the sheet was still wet the cut noodles would stick together after emerging from the cutting attachment.

These would make good lasagna

Pasta Factory Worker at the Noodle Cutting Machine

Looks like someone herbed it up

Just after cutting, the noodles are not yet suitable for bundling since they are still too moist and would become compacted and stuck together. So we put them on a rack to dry for a while, which also provides a convenient place to manually separate the noodles if they are stuck together at the edges. Plain noodles don't stick together if the dough is mixed up on the dry side and the sheets are left to dry long enough. But herb and spinach noodles stick together where pieces of vegetation end up on a noodle boundary since the noodle cutter apparently isn't built to cut through anything but soft noodle dough.

Drying and Separation