Essential Homemade Pasta

Our homemade pasta recipe is perfect for home cooks of all levels, even beginners! We use this fresh egg pasta dough for spaghetti, fettuccine, pappardelle, capellini, and even lasagna sheets!

Few recipes tug at my heartstrings as much as fresh homemade pasta. If you’ve never made it before and wonder if this recipe is for you, stop. You can do it (I promise!). Homemade pasta will make you feel like a rockstar. Truly. I always feel so accomplished when I’ve made this recipe, and I think you will, too.

The ingredient list is short (just 4 ingredients), and the process is really simple, but if you’re still hesitant, we’ve included extra tips, a few key photos, and a helpful video below so you feel confident. For some of my favorite pasta recipes and ways to serve it, look at our homemade pasta sauce, perfect basil pesto, my favorite fettuccine Alfredo, and these exceptionally delicious Italian meatballs with the most delicious sauce.

Key Ingredients

• Flour: All-purpose (unbleached) will do, but if you want to upgrade your pasta, use ’00’ flour (doppio zero flour). It’s a finer grind than all-purpose, which makes your pasta more silky, smooth, and light. My local grocery store sells it, but you can also buy it online. There are many Italian brands, and King Arthur Flour and Bob’s Red Mill have recently come out with their own’ 00′ flour (sometimes called pizza flour or Italian-style flour). I also use ’00’ flour in my pizza dough recipe.
• Eggs: Our recipe calls for whole eggs. If you can find eggs with super yellow or orange yolks, use them for a really pretty pasta. I like to weigh my eggs before making the pasta dough. You need between 220 grams and 228 grams for this recipe, which should be equivalent to 4 large eggs, but if your eggs are on the smaller side, you may need to increase the liquid slightly by adding an egg yolk or some more beaten egg.
• Salt: We add salt to the dough and the water used to cook the pasta.
• Olive Oil: A little olive oil adds a bit of flavor, but more importantly, it adds richness and smoothness to the dough, making it less likely to stick to itself or the pasta machine during the rolling and cutting process.

How to Make Homemade Pasta

I make the pasta dough right on my counter, make a well with the flour, and fill it with eggs, salt, and olive oil. You’ll whisk the middle, pulling in some flour into the middle.

Then, when about half is mixed in, use your hands or a bench scraper to incorporate the rest (watch me do this in our video). You will knead the pasta dough for 5 to 10 minutes. You’ll slowly notice it turning into a smooth dough as you knead.

We’ll turn the dough into thin pasta sheets from here using a pasta roller, where you will move through the thickness settings, with most of your time spent on the thickest setting (#1).

As you do this, you want to keep your dough dusted with flour to prevent sticking. Also, if you see your dough getting way out of shape, fold it to bring it back to a rectangle like this:

The thickness setting you stop at depends on what you are making. Level #6 is a good all-purpose thickness for linguine, fettuccine, pappardelle, or lasagna sheets. You’ll want to run your pasta sheet through level #7 and possibly #8 for thinner noodles like spaghetti or capellini.

You have many choices for cutting your pasta. You can keep it as sheets and use it for lasagna. Make fettuccine for chicken Alfredo, make spaghetti for these Italian meatballs, or hand-cut the sheets to make wider noodles like pappardelle (which I love for this mushroom pasta).

When you’ve got your noodles, hang them on a drying rack or place small nests of noodles onto a parchment-lined and lightly floured baking sheet. Let the pasta dry until it is no longer sticky before cooking. Or freeze it per our recipe directions. You can cook your homemade pasta from fresh or frozen, instructions are in the recipe. Happy pasta making!