Tagliatelle is one of the easiest pastas to make as it's fast, simple and you don't need a pasta machine.
Ingredients
- 300g Flour ("tipo 00"/strong white)
- 3 medium eggs
- Extra flour for dusting
Equipment
- A mixing bowl
- A sharp kitchen knife
- A rolling pin or pasta rolling machine
The recipe is also super easy to remember, and can be easily modified to make more or fewer portions, as it is 100g of flour for every egg.
Method
Pour the flower into the bowl and create a hollow in the middle. Crack the eggs into the hollow and beat with a fork. Once thoroughly beaten, begin mixing the eggs into the flour.
While the dough is sticky, continue to work it in the bowl, but once it starts becoming smoother, lightly dust your worktop with flour and continue to work the dough there. Keep working it until the dough is smooth and elastic, but do not over-knead it.
Once done, shape the dough into a loaf shape and cover the dough and leave it for about 20-30 minutes at room temperature.
After the dough has rested, cut it into slices, as if it were a loaf of bread. Keep these slices fairly thick. As a rule of thumb, the number of eggs you used = the number of slices. So in our case, three slices.
With a pasta machine:
Dust the rollers with some flour and and roll the dough slices through them on the widest setting. Fold the dough and repeat once or twice. Decrease the roller spacing by one notch and repeat the above: folding and rolling. You do not want to go down to the thinnest setting, but just couple above it (about a mm or two in thickness). If your dough is coming out as an ellipse rather than with straight edges, you can fold in the sides and put it through the rollers one last time.
Lay out each sheet on a flour dusted surface.
With a rolling pin:
The goal is the same as with the pasta machine. Dust your worktop with flour and begin rolling out the slices. Do not aim to roll each to the desired thickness straight away, but instead roll it, fold it, roll it again, and keep repeating this as you work down to about a mm or two in thickness.
You can cut the edges of the dough to make them more like lasagna sheets and then gather the scraps and roll out one more smaller sheet.
Now, dust the tops of each sheet and leave them for a few minutes to dry.
After drying a little, we want to roll the the sheets up like swiss rolls, but instead of rolling them into a cylinder, we start by folding over a few cm, then folding that over again and again, until you end up with flat rolls of pasta sheets.
Take your knife and cut the rolls into slices. The thickness of these will be the thickness of the tagliatelle.
Unravel each slice into a strand of taglialtelle and drop them in a pile. Constantly sprinkle a bit of flour and mix it into the pile as it grows, so it doesn't all stick into a big clump.
Now, it's ready to cook immediately or to be twirled into "birds nests" and frozen.