(egg-less) homemade pasta dough.
I love the idea of homemade pasta. In fact, I started a whole business around homemade pasta (hiiii, @themiscelaproject).
An egg pasta dough is beautiful - it’s rich and indulgent, and I would never slander it. However, sometimes you want to have a pasta party, a pasta making date, or a relaxing night of cooking. Enter, the no-fuss pasta dough. The 50% hydration method has never served me wrong, and I’ve done it countless times.
This pasta only has two ingredients, flour and water. Take the time to source the right flour - we want semola flour. Similar to semolina in that it’s made from durham wheat, semola is milled twice, yeilding a finer grind that adds a silkiness to the texture of this pasta dough.
For every serving of pasta, you will use 112.5g of semola flour. Since we’re using the 50% hydration method- for every 1 gram of semola flour, you will use 0.5 gram of warm water. (Yes, you need a kitchen scale!)
For example, for 2 servings of pasta, you will need...
225g semola flour
112.5g warm water
Recipe <3
Mise out (measure out) your flour and water, separately. [112.5g flour per serving, and half it’s weight in water]
Make a well in the flour, and slowly pour in the warm water, pouring in stages as to not break the well.
Using a fork, mix the water in a circular motion, almost like making a vortex in a pool. Slowly expand the circle to incorporate the flour into the water.
Once mixture is shaggy, ditch the fork and transition to your hands. Kneed and press the dough into a ball using both hands. You are activating the gluten! Kneed for roughly 10 minutes, then when dough is a ball (it will still be textured) wrap tightly in cling wrap and let rest for 10 minutes.
Kneed dough again for roughly 5 minutes, texture should be smooth, though it can still have folds.
Wrap dough again and let rest for 30 minutes- 3 hours.
To recap - kneed for 10, rest for 10, kneed for 5, rest for 30min-3hr...
Kneed your dough about 15 times before cutting and rolling your shape of choice… see cavatelli, orecchiette, capunti, for starters.
This dough only needs 3-4 minutes in salty, boiling water to cook to al dente!
