Happy Wednesday pretty friends! Today I am so excited to tell you about making pasta for the first time ever at Bellina Alimentari. Not going to lie, I was a little nervous about attempting to make pasta. Fortunately, Chef Tyler did an amazing job walking us through it.
For those of you who haven’t heard, Bellina Alimentari is an Italian restaurant located inside Ponce City Market. Every month they offer a range of cooking classes, tastings and fun culinary workshops. Their goal is to create a community of food lovers and bring back to the table the conversation of good food. You can see a full list of their classes by clicking here.
I had the pleasure of attending one of their hands on Pasta Making Classes last week. Chef Tyler set up our table with our materials, which included aprons, eggs and flour. We dove right in and started mixing the two different flours. After mixing the flours we added the egg and started the kneading the dough. The mixing and kneading takes about 10 minutes, then you let it rest for 30 minutes. You can use this resting time to pull together the ingredients for the pasta sauce. After resting, rolling out and cutting the dough takes maybe another 10 to 20 minutes, depending on how fast you go and how many helpers you have.
While we waited for our dough, Chef Tyler showed us how to use the pasta machine. This giant machine takes the dough and presses it. Every time we put it through the machine it grew tremendously in size! We had a lot of fun helping create the long, flat pasta.
Once the pasta was flat enough, Chef Tyler let us put it through the same machine to create different size pasta. My favorite is the linguini noodles- what is your favorite?
Chef continue to educate us and told us that once you’ve made your pasta, you can cook it right away, dry it, or freeze it for later. When you do cook it, remember that homemade pasta cooks much more quickly than the dried pasta you buy in stores. Give it about four minutes in salted boiling water, taste it, and keep checking in one-minute increments until the pasta is al dente.
We all got to sample the pasta we made with Bellina Alimentari’s homemade tomato sauce. This was of course my favorite part of the class because the pasta was excellent! You can definitely taste the difference between store bought and homemade pasta.
Overall I had a blast learning how to make pasta from scratch. I also feel more confident and comfortable making it in my own kitchen! Make sure you head over to Bellina Alimentari to see what classes you can take this summer! It would be a great activity for a date night or even with your kids. Enjoy!
Xo,
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