How To Make Pasta

WHAT YOU NEED:

2/3 cup flour

pinch salt

1 egg mixed up with a fork

rolling pin

permission to make a mess

WHAT TO DO: Make a little hill with the flour and dig a crater at the top, like a volcano. Put the salt and the egg in the crater and chop into the hill with the fork. Start kneading it with your fingers and keep doing it until you get a ball of dough that isn’t at all sticky. If the dough is too stiff to work, add a teaspoon of water.

MORE STUFF: Let the ball sit for ½ hour. Spread some flour on a cutting board. Roll out the ball on top of the flour until you get a thin layer of dough. Use a butter knife to cut the thin dough into long strips. If you want, trim them to any length you like. Cover with a towel until they dry.

SO WHAT: Boil your dried noodles. Serve in soup or with a bit of melted butter or margarine.

Your noodles are held together by long strings of a protein in wheat called gluten (GLOO-ten). Gluten absorbs a lot of water, but is not dissolved in water. When you knead gluten, it’s a lot like you’re tangling up fishing line into a big, knotted and very strong mess. These tangled strings are what gives wheat paste its strength, too.

The eggs in your noodles provided color, fat and water. Machine-made pasta doesn’t need eggs at all and can easily be made with water—or vegetable juices, which is where all that colored pasta comes from.

PASTA WORDS:

Noodle—From the German word "nudel"

Spaghetti—Italian for little strings

Linguine—Italian for little tongues

Vermicelli—Italian for little worms

Macaroni—18th-century British slang for someone who tries to impress you with his or her knowledge of Europe. Not a compliment

P.S. Gluten is something you eat every day. The walls of all those thousands of tiny bubbles in bread are made from kneaded gluten.

You Can with beakman & jax ©1994 Universal Press Syndicate