Home made spaghetti, part 2 of 3

In our last episode, we made a pasta drying rack. Those who own a pasta drying rack must dry pasta, and those who must dry pasta must make pasta. I picked up the $70 food grinder/pasta maker combo for my Kitchenaid stand mixer. Totally worth it. It's like 7 tools in one, more if you get some of the attachments. So I slapped on the thick spaghetti plate, made some pasta according to the instruction booklet, and fired up the pasta goodness.

First off -- if your recipe doesn't call for salt, add some. I used Mighty Mario Batali's recipe, and it came out... bland. Yeah, I salted the hell out of the water, but it didn't save it. I don't know why.

Follow your instruction booklet. It's there for a reason. I swear I had one of these when I was a kid, except you can't eat Playdough. Well, you can, but you wouldn't want to.


Now that snarl of pasta that comes out at first is just that -- a snarl. If you've ever gone fishing and snarled your line, you really just wanna cut it off. Same with pasta: use your kitchen shears to trim off the bottom so you get a nice even to work with when you go to separate the noodles later. The neat thing is that you can throw that bit back into the pasta maker and reuse it.


You may find it a good idea to hold the noodle mass up and steady as they extrude. This is to alleviate the weight of the rest of the noodles to not stretch them.


Snip again, shut off your mixer and lay the noodles out. If you did this right, you should have something that looks like pull-apart licorice, except it's made of pasta. Pull it apart, and hang it on the racks you just lovingly made, and let dry for 15-60 minutes.


Almost there ladies and gentlemen. Up next, the sauce.