Anyone who's tried fresh pasta at an Italian restaurant knows it has a unique texture that can't be found in dried pasta. I've seen fresh pasta in my local grocery store, but finding it in the whole grain variety isn't as easy as finding it in the refined flour variety. I love the fresh pasta texture, but it would just not be GAINZ to eat too much refined flour. That's why I recently broke out my pasta maker and came up with a nice whole wheat and spelt flour egg white noodle. Making fresh pasta is a little labor intensive, but getting a nice fresh pasta texture as well as the freedom to incorporate a variety of interesting whole grains makes the extra work well worth it.
The noodles pictured to the right are made from half a cup each of spelt flour and whole wheat flour, as well as two egg whites. Just throw the flour in a bowl and mix it together, then toss in the egg whites and knead it into a thick dough. It should be as dense and thick as bread dough. The humidity in my kitchen was perfect for this dough, but if your dough just won't come together, you can sprinkle in a little bit of water.
Follow the instructions on your pasta maker to produce your noodles. This dough is intended to go through the pasta makers that run the dough through two rollers, not an extruder. I like to roll this pasta out into a sheet of medium thickness before cutting it into linguine.
Cook it in a large pot of boiling water for about two minutes. Mushy pasta sucks, so watch your cooking time. Fresh pasta overcooks very quickly. It would be a shame to put all the labor into your pasta, only to end up with a pot of wet oatmeal.
Throw your cooked pasta into your preferred sauce and then toss it together. I used some lean turkey chili in the photo.
Fresh pasta can be a difficult task, but if you put in the time, you'll find that it's well worth the effort.
-Paisley GAINZ
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