Fresh einkorn pasta

The base dough for all the pasta recipes here. Einkorn makes a golden, tender egg pasta that needs far less kneading than semolina dough and cooks in a couple of minutes. This page covers mixing, rolling, and cutting it into each shape.

Serves 4 as a main (about 500 g fresh pasta)
Active 40 min
Total about 1¼ hours

Ingredients

300 g fresh-milled whole einkorn flour, sifted (see notes)
3 large eggs and 1 egg yolk
2 tsp olive oil
A pinch of fine salt

Method

Mix and rest

Heap the flour on a worktop and make a wide well in the middle. Add the eggs, yolk, oil and salt to the well. Beat them with a fork, gradually drawing in flour from the inside wall until it's too stiff to stir.
Bring it together with your hands and knead for 3–5 minutes, until smooth. If it's crumbly, add a teaspoon of water at a time. If it's sticky, dust it lightly with flour.
Wrap it and rest it for 30 minutes at room temperature. This lets the bran soften, so the dough rolls without cracking.

Roll

Cut the dough into 4 pieces and keep the ones you aren't using wrapped, because einkorn dough dries quickly.
Flatten a piece and feed it through a pasta machine at the widest setting. Fold it in thirds and roll it again; do this twice. Then roll it through each setting once, down to the thickness for your shape (below). Dust lightly with flour if it sticks.

Cut

Tagliolini: second-thinnest setting. Cut into 2 mm strands.
Tagliatelle: second- or third-thinnest setting. Cut into 6–8 mm ribbons.
Pappardelle: third-thinnest setting. Cut into 2–2.5 cm ribbons.
Ravioli: second-thinnest setting, so the doubled edges aren't thick. Use the sheets straight away.

To cut ribbons by hand, dust the sheet well with flour, roll it up loosely from the short end, and slice it with a sharp knife. Shake the ribbons out straight away and toss them with a little flour, then lay them in loose nests on a floured tray.

Cook

Boil a large pan of water with a good handful of salt; it should taste like the sea.
Cook the ribbons for 1½–3 minutes, depending on thickness. Taste one after a minute. Einkorn pasta goes from tender to soft quickly, so drain it while it still has a little bite. It finishes cooking in the sauce.
Save a mug of the cooking water before draining. It's starchy, and it helps the sauce cling.

Notes

Sift the flour. Push freshly milled einkorn through a fine sieve and use what passes through. Coarse bran is the main reason whole-grain pasta tears. Put the sifted-out bran in bread.
No pasta machine: roll the dough with a long rolling pin on a lightly floured worktop, until you can just see your hand through it.
Storing: dry the nests on the tray for 30 minutes, then freeze them on the tray and bag them. Cook from frozen, adding a minute.