"How do I make my own homemade pasta dough?"

And I love that you're asking that question

because once you master how to make your own pasta dough,

you will never, ever look back.

It's one of the most beautiful things to be able to make for your family

and it's really, really easy.

I'll show you how. You just need a few ingredients.

I've got 550 grams of "double o" flour.

Now, 00 - you'll see it here on the bag,

it just says it literally there,

zero, zero -

00 flour means it's ground really, really fine,

so it's super-refined which makes it really easy to make pasta with.

So I always like to use that Italian style 00 flour.

And then you need six egg yolks and four whole eggs.

And you can literally do this with your hands.

Make sure they're nice and clean. You're gonna get a little messy.

But what I do first of all is I just make a little well

inside the centre of the bowl there, in the flour,

then I drop in my egg yolks

and then I drop in my eggs.

Now, of course you can do this in the food processor.

You could also do this in a big bowl with a dough hook, in your mixer.

I like to do it with my hands because then you really get used to

the texture of the dough as you're working with it.

You need a little bit of extra virgin olive oil,

not too much, just a teaspoon or two.

OK.

And then you just work it together.

So your hand's gonna start off... it's gonna get a little sticky

but then it'll dry up pretty quick.

And just a good pinch of salt.

Right, so once your dough starts to come together,

you can actually get it on out of the bowl.

And eventually you're gonna work all of this into here.

So you just wanna get it and give it a good old knead.

You know, of course you can use a mixer,

but for me, I'd rather do it by hand.

You burn off a couple of extra calories

so you don't need to go to the gym that night.

And you also don't have to do as much cleaning up, which I like.

So you'll start to feel the dough get a little sticky in your hands,

which is good because then you're gonna start to pick up

some of this other drier ingredient here.

Just continue to work it in.

You'll come to understand the feeling of it, you know?

Occasionally it'll be a little firmer

and sometimes it might be a little softer,

and that could change depending on the size of your eggs,

it could change depending on the humidity.

So just get used to the feel of it.

So once you've worked the dough,

you've really exercised the gluten in the flour,

so it'll become very elastic,

so what you need to do next is wrap it up in cling film,

stick it in the fridge for about 45 minutes, an hour,

a couple of hours if you've got the time.

And then what's gonna happen is it's gonna really soften

and then you'll see the elasticity of it

when you actually come to rolling it.

Once your pasta dough's had an hour or so to rest,

we'll take it out and I'll show you how to roll it.

This is the little machine that will enable you to roll it.

And this is the one you'll probably find in most stores.

It's got a little handle that just clips in there

and you just need to lock it in onto your bench

using this, twist that up,

and then you can just go ahead and hand-roll it,

which is really nice because it gives you real control

over how fast you feed it into the machine.

I have a bit of a fancier one today

so I'm just gonna sit this one up here.

And this is just an attachment that goes into your mixer.

So I've got some pasta dough.

It's the exact same process.

The pasta goes in here, of course those two rollers are rolling around,

and it comes out nice and thin.

So you can adjust the thickness of the pasta

by this little knob down the end here.

It just means that it does the work for you, which I kinda like.

You take your pasta dough...

I'm gonna cut it in half, then half again.

So you get yourself a little piece of the pasta dough

and then you sort of flatten it out in your hand.

Try and get it into a bit of a rectangle sort of a shape.

Like that.

You can push it down, you can use a rolling pin too if you like,

but don't use any more flour at this point.

You wanna keep it nice and dry.

That's a big mistake a lot of people make, is they dust it with flour

and then you really start messing with the consistency of your pasta.

OK, so we turn that on.

Try and get it into the shape that you're gonna want it in

and then you just feed it in through the top

And it rolls straight on out the bottom.

Once you get it into a sheet like this,

I usually put it back in without changing the thickness.

And then I fold it back onto itself and I continue that process.

And then this way, you're starting to sort of layer the pasta up on itself.

So you wanna fold it quite a few times.

And then you're simply gonna move this wheel in, number by number -

it starts at one, which is the widest,

and it goes all the way up to seven or eight.

And then you're just gonna slowly move that in.

And then of course, the thinner you go,

the longer your pasta sheet is gonna become.

And you see you end up with this beautiful long sheet of pasta.

Now, once you've made these beautiful long lasagne sheets,

of course you can cut them into any size you like.

Give it a really light dusting of semolina.

You can fold it up on itself.

A little bit more semolina.

And again.

And then you can go through and cut it.

Of course there's another attachment that will cut it for you

but it's kinda cool to do it yourself like this as well.

Then you pick these up.

You've just made your own beautiful fettuccini.

Of course you can make pappardelle, you can make linguini,

it all just depends on how thick you cut it.

So use some more of that semolina.

That'll keep it nice and dry.

Once you get used to using one of these, you can become quick at it.

So I've just squeezed my pasta dough back out and I'm gonna...

..feed it on through.

And then get it back in there onto itself,

which means you end up with a little bit of a loop.

And then you can actually start

to pull your hand away from the pasta machine

and you can regulate the thickness of the pasta

without really having to worry too much about the wheel.

And then of course the more you stretch the pasta out,

the thinner it's gonna become.

So you can see by sort of using...

..two hands, you can make a whole lot of lasagne pretty fast.

OK, so you end up with some beautiful long lasagne sheets,

where I think the coolest thing about this

is how fast the pasta actually cooks.

If you drop these sheets into boiling water,

you literally have cooked pasta in 60 seconds - it's that fast.

It's really simple but it's really fun.

That flavour of fresh pasta is so different to that of dried,

so go away, get yourself one of these little gizmos and have some fun.

Enjoy.