The Pasta maker is such a blessing to our family. I have used it to make everything Asian so far: ramen, to Chinese noodles : fine noodles (细面), mee pok (面婆), wrappers for wonton, gyoza, pot stickers, soba.
I have yet figured the right recipe for Udon and the rice flour-based noodles and wrappers. But I believe I will figure them out once I have some time.
Next question is how do you choose a good pasta maker?
I have tried so many!
Pasta machine is great for making home made noodles
The extension to the Kitchenaid – fast and great for the noodles, but doesn’t get thin enough for the wrappers. I like mine really thin.
The extension to the Kenwood Major – So hard to fit into the machine! Really fast to get your pasta made, but again far too thick for wrappers.
My favourite? The manual ones. Ok. We have to be careful here. There are so many different kinds of manual pasta makers out there. I have bought some useless ones that are a pain to use. I had one that was endorsed by Jaimie Oliver but is inaccurate and weird. The biggest number was the thickest.
On a usual machine, the smallest number is the thickest. I don’t know why that machine is so weird.
My favourite machine is the Marcato Atlas 150. It is always consistent.
For the recipe below, I have chosen to use common home available ingredients. You can of course replace them with anything you like, including making them vegan by not adding the eggs and use alkaline water to make the dough yellow instead. You can change the water for any kind of juice with or without the pulp: carrot, spinach, beetroot, celery. Or add matcha or charcoal powder. The sky is the limit! Let your creativity flow!
The Pasta Maker Egg Noodle
Ingredients
Equipment
- Marcato Pasta Machine https://amzn.to/2pNMZR8
Materials
- 2 cups Plain flour
- 1/2 cup water + 1 egg Total liquid not more than 1/2 cup leave out eggs if you are making white-based wrappers like for gyoza or ??
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup corn flour for dusting
Instructions
- Mix all the ingredients together and knead until they come together. It takes muscles!
- Divide into 4 portions.
Rolling method
- First, we need to create the gluten to get the QQ or bouncy mouth feel of Chinese noodles.
- Pinch together one portion of the dough and flatten it a bit. It should be very hard to do, since it should not come together easily.
- Run through the machine at #0.
- Fold the dough in half, and roll through the machine again. Do this until your dough is super smooth, like the skin of a baby's bump.
- Cover both sides of the dough generously with corn flour.
- Adjust the machine to #2. Run the dough through.
- If you are making ramen or fine noodles, run the dough through #3, #5. Then stop.
- Fix the cutter and cut the noodles.
- If you are making mee pok, go to #6 and cut using the fatter cutter.
- If you are making dumplings, work through from #2, #5, #7, #8
- If you are making wontons or gyozas, work through from #2, #5, #7, #9.
- For wrappers, cut into circles using cookie cutters of 3 inch diameter.
