What makes pasta

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First, place the flour in a mound on a clean countertop or cutting board and make a well in the center. Put the eggs and salt into the well. Whisk the eggs together with a fork without disturbing the flour. Using a fork, gently incorporate the flour into the egg mixture a little at a time. Once you have incorporated all of the flour together with the egg using a fork, switch to a bench knife or bench scraper if you have one, or use your fingertips to really blend the mixture together.

After the wet and dry ingredients have been well combined using the dough knife, bring the mixture together with your hands to form a ball. If the dough seems too dry, beat an extra egg and add some of it to the dough a little at a time. You might not need a whole extra egg.

You need to end up with a dough that doesn't stick and is malleable, so more moisture is sometimes needed. If the mixture is too wet and sticks to your fingers, rub your hands with flour and form the dough into a ball. Do the same once more if needed but be careful not to overdo the amount of flour because you'll end up with a dry ball that might need more moisture. Once you have a dough that is easy to handle, doesn't stick to your hands, and keeps its shape when formed into a ball, knead the pasta dough as you would with bread dough.

The easiest method is to push down and away from you with the palm of your hand. Then turn the dough ninety degrees, fold the dough over on itself and push down and away again. Continue this until the dough is smooth, for about 7 to 10 minutes. Using the bench knife, cut the dough into 3 equal sections. Alternatively, you can weigh your dough and divide it into 3 equals parts. Form each section into a ball, and cover the dough balls with a towel or bowl.

Let rest for 15 minutes. This term can also be applied to the product itself, if that product has been made in a semi-mechanized way, using only high-quality ingredients. Often these two go together, as the artisan is making something by hand, that is of high-quality, which then creates an artisan product.

This style of production has grown in popularity over the last several years, especially in the food industry. Restaurants, grocery stores and chefs alike are creating more artisan products to meet the demands of their customers.

Often, people are willing to pay more money for a meal handcrafted with high quality ingredients, as opposed to the alternative. While boxed pasta is notoriously cheap, the flavor and consistency cannot be matched to that of hand-made, artisan dried pasta. For the daring home chef, the process of making pasta from scratch can be time-consuming, especially if the proper ingredients and tools are not being used. But for the artisan, creating pasta is an art form.

Because firmness is so important with pasta, choosing a hard, high-protein, flour is a safe bet. And with wheat flour, the protein we're referring to is gluten.

Gluten is what gives pasta its bite and elasticity. So, higher gluten equals more firmness and elasticity. But all flour has gluten in it and the gluten is developed in relation to how long the dough is mixed and kneaded. More mixing makes a firmer, stretchier dough. That means a medium flour, like all-purpose flour, can work for making pasta, but you'll need to mix it enough.

Remember, too, that much of the stretchiness of a pasta comes from letting the dough rest after kneading it, as much as from the kneading itself. On the other hand, a soft flour like cake flour, or pastry flour, wouldn't make a good pasta.

There's no amount of kneading that will make a good, chewy pasta from those flours. It's not their fault—that's just not what they're made for. Save them for making cookies, cakes , and pies.

One of the most popular flours for making pasta is semolina flour, which is a coarsely ground flour made from a particularly hard variety of wheat called durum. In fact, the word durum means hard as in the word "durable" , in reference to the amount of force it takes to grind it. This hardness also happens to correspond with its protein content, which is around 13 percent as compared with all-purpose flour, which has a protein content of 8 to 11 percent.

Its coarse grind gives pasta made from semolina a rougher texture, which is great for hearty sauces to grab onto. Another feature of semolina flour is that it has a natural golden hue to it, which comes from the color of the durum wheat itself.