Pasta making tips?

Has anyone here made their own pasta before?

I got a pasta machine for Christmas and we're going to christen it this weekend with a couple of friends. I've made pasta before when I was at uni, but that was a good ten years ago now and I only helped with the rolling and handling then and not the actual making of the dough!

Does anyone have any tips for making it? And what kind of flour should I go for?

thanks!

I've always thought cutting it out was the tricky part, but since you've got a machine, that shouldn't be a huge issue.

So, no real particular tips, just the usual as with any dough. Add the flour a bit at a time to make sure the dough is even, and you don't get too much.  Don't over-work it.  If it's being hard to work with, try letting it dry/cool for a little while. 

As for the flour, I've always just used all-purpose flour in the U.S., but then I'm usually making more of an egg noodle than a lighter, Italian-style pasta. There are more finely-milled flours available that are recommended for pasta.  If you can find one specified '00' or 'Doppio zero' (or sometimes just 'Italian style'), it's supposed to make excellent pasta.  Also, of course, you can use semolina flour, or a mixture of regular & semolina.

The recipe I've always used is three parts semolina pasta flour to one part all-purpose, a teaspoon of salt, two eggs, and two tablespoons of olive oil per cup of flour, blended well and kneaded for about a minute then left to rest for fifteen minutes before being rolled and cut. This makes a coarse pasta that holds sauces really well, and the dough is easy to work with, though you may need to add a bit of water if it's too dry.

ooh I hadn't thought about semolina - we've got tons of it after my husband bought fine white corn meal thinking it was masa harina. Can I try this in one of the batches, or is semolina flour something different? It's the same stuff I'd use to make Southern-style cornbread, but more finely milled and white instead of yellow.

Semolina is wheat.

Semolina is wheat.

Ahh, so it is. My end of the day brain fart was to confuse it with polenta! Thanks for averting a pasta tragedy...

I was thinking that was going to be some lumpy pasta. 

Our pasta party went really well on Saturday! I found these two articles really helpful - Jamie Oliver and The Guardian.

We went with Jaime's easy-to-remember recipe of 100g flour (we used "Pasta flour" from Tesco) to 1 egg. He suggested 600g/6 eggs for four people, but even with greedy us, this resulted in a bunch of leftovers.

The recipes both say, but I was still really surprised at how DIFFICULT pasta dough is to knead, omg! I've made bread tons of times and I really rather enjoy kneading that, but this is so hard and unyielding that my husband and I had to keep taking turns to rest our wrists. It took ages, too, something like 15-20min to get the balls to be the consistency of play dough. We split the dough up into four balls and cling filmed them tightly to sit in the fridge.

By comparison, the pasta machine stuff was dead easy! We had one ball that kept cracking and breaking under the rollers, so we decided it must be too dry and sprayed it with a bit of water, wrapped it back up in the cling film, and did that one last. And that did the trick! It was helpful having four pairs of hands the first time, but I think next time we'll be okay with just the two of us.

We dried the pasta on laundry racks, making sure they were spaced so they wouldn't stick together, and the batch we couldn't eat fresh we put in the room with the dehumidifier and it was crisp in a few hours for storage and eating later this week.

The pasta itself was v tasty, but we both agreed we'd go one click thinner next time (#2 instead of 3). And we're very much looking forward to making totally homemade lasagna (one of my husband's specialities!).