I love Saturdays. I love them when my husband is off BUT weekends when he works are on a whole different level. Those are the days when I go into super productive mode and do everything I should have been doing all week. Or sometimes I do things I actually enjoy doing :)
On this particular Saturday I decided to make noodles. Let me give some background on how this started. When Bob and I were engaged, we were bored one night and decided that we wanted to make our own ravioli. After looking up a recipe online, we were like, "oh yea we can totally do this!" Actually, we totally could not do this. It took us at least 5 hours to roll out the dough, make the filling, and put the ravioli together. Then the dough was so thick that we were basically eating starch balls. I'm being dramatic. They really didn't taste that bad. But the amount of work that we put into it made me lose my appetite. I told my Oma (German for grandma) about our experience and she passed the story onto her aunt. (Side note: her aunt was a German-cooking-noodle-making expert. She recently passed away so this is kind of in her memory.) Well, my great aunt could not believe that we attempted ravioli making without a noodle maker. I honestly had no idea this was a real thing. Newsflash: it is (see above). So she bought one for our wedding, with a ravioli maker attachment.
I had no idea how I was going to tackle this noodle making business so I relied on my Oma to help me. The hardest part might have been figuring out how to put the device together. A lot of pieces and a lot of Italian directions. We figured it out and it only took us a couple of hours. The next time I did it, I made lobster ravioli and it turned out 10 times better than our first attempt. Here's a noodle making tutorial for what I did this time around.
The best thing about making noodles is that you only need 3 ingredients! AND it's stuff you would normally have on hand anyways: eggs, flour, and water. I decided to use whole wheat flour this time just for laughs.
The other great thing is that you use an even ratio of eggs and flour. The recipe the machine came with calls for 2 cups of flour and 2 large eggs.
Let me tell you how cool I felt when made a flour pool and cracked the eggs in it: very cool. I never would have done this if Oma didn't show me. I'm not a big dough-maker, but apparently this is the expert way to do it. I mixed the eggs and flour with a fork until it looked like this:
Then comes the water. The first time I did this, Oma said that you just add a teaspoon at a time until you get the right texture. Your dough has to be not too sticky and not too dry. Basically it will look like this when it's right:
Now the hard part. I despise rolling pins and everything they stand for (except when used as self defense weapons). But I had to learn. The first time we did it we rolled until the dough was almost paper thin. Little did we know that the noodle maker will do some of this for you. This was great news for me because my scrawny arms are not willing to do extreme manual labor.
After rolling out the dough to the best of my abilities I ran it through the machine. This thing has 8 different levels of thickness and since I want to use my rolling pin as little as possible, I start at 8 and work my way down to 2. You crank it through and the dough flattens like magic. It's pretty therapeutic actually. A little rectangle of dough comes out this long:
Amazing, right? Once it's flat, I cut it to the length I wanted for my noodles. Then the really fun part comes. Send that paper thing dough through the noodle slicing section.
I chose to make the wider noodles this time. It also has a section for making really thin noodles that you might use in soup. Once the noodles are cut, it's time for them to dry.
I couldn't believe that little ball of dough made enough noodles to cover my entire counter! Funny story: I left for a couple hours while they were drying. I came home and they were no longer straight, but curved like the letter C. Some of them actually came to life and ended up on the floor. And then one ended up in Ricky the dog's mouth. It's quite possible that he was feasting on uncooked noodles all afternoon. I really wouldn't put it past him...that dog is out of his mind.
And that was my third noodle making experience. I highly recommend trying it. Not only is it fun, but of course, it's healthy-ish and cheaper than buying noodles. Since they have to dry overnight, we won't be eating them tonight. So tomorrow will be pasta night and I'll share the recipe I use :)
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