Pasta school 1: Make your own maccheroni

Gustini’s pasta school

This year, we have decided to give our customers and readers some tips on preparing pasta. Some may have already tried their hand at homemade pasta. Others may have been planning to do so for months or even years. No more excuses will be accepted. If you’re still thinking: I don’t even have a pasta machine – we won’t let that stand and start with some recipes for which you don’t even need a pasta machine, not even a rolling pin. All you need is durum wheat flour, water and salt. And a little time and patience. If you involve your family or friends, you can even turn it into a social event. You don’t need much concentration – so there’s plenty of time for quattro chiacchiere (literally: four chats).

Preparing the dough

The pasta dough

No matter which pasta you want to make yourself, it all starts with the pasta dough. Some people swear by pure dough made from durum wheat flour, water and salt, while others are keen to add eggs to the dough to give it a richer color. For maccheroni, a type of southern Italian pasta, we recommend the recipe for pasta dough without eggs in our recipe collection. In any case, durum wheat flour is preferable to the soft wheat flour that is more commonly available in Germany. Allow about 15 minutes kneading time plus 1 hour resting time in the fridge to prepare the dough.

You can use the maccheroni immediately or prepare it the evening before, leave it to dry overnight and then use it when cooking.

Shaping the pasta

Make your own maccheroni

The most important utensil for making maccheroni yourself (and many other types of pasta) is a metal rod approx. 30 cm long and approx. 0.3 – 0.5 cm in diameter. You can use thick knitting needles, buy a thin metal rod from the DIY store (as smooth as possible) and saw it to 30 cm or use chopsticks (although these are usually tapered, which is not ideal). The sticks from the DIY store are usually about 100 cm long, so you can make three and find two helpers for the preparation.

Cut off a piece of the dough and roll it into a thumb-thick roll about 15 cm long. Cut pieces about 0.5 cm wide from this. Then place the stick/knitting needle on the small piece of dough, fold the dough over a little with your thumb, hold the stick a little firmly with your weaker hand and roll the dough around the stick in sweeping forward movements with your strong hand. The dough wraps around the stick and forms a tube. Do not press the dough too firmly against the stick and do not roll it too thinly, otherwise you will not be able to get the tube down without deforming it. Then pull the dough off the stick and start on the next maccheroni.

I sometimes find even written descriptions very confusing, hence the photo instructions. Unfortunately, the actual shaping went so quickly that we couldn’t get a sharp photo.