If you've ever wanted to make fresh pasta at home, here is how!
Ingredients
1tbspolive oil
2cupsall purpose flour
3eggs
Shells from 1 lb crawfish
1cupheavy cream
10leavesof fresh tarragonor parsley, if you don't like tarragon
Instructions
To make the pasta: Put the olive oil, flour, and eggs into a food processor and pulse until it forms a big mass along the wall of the food processor. (Since gluten levels vary among different brands of flour, here are some troubleshooting tips. Basically, you want the pasta to feel moist to your finger but you don’t want it to be sticky. Higher gluten flours need more egg, so if your dough feels too dry add another egg, starting with the yolk, and if it still needs more moisture, add the egg white. Conversely, if the dough feels wet, you can add a little bit of flour to dry it out a little bit).
Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead it with your hand for a minute or two until it is one big ball of dough. You can now roll out the dough in a pasta roller as thinly as you can.
Cut noodles with your pasta maker and put them in a loose pile on the countertop. Throw in a lot of flour, tossing it with more flour every 10 minutes for about 45 minutes. This will help the noodles dry out a bit, so you don’t get a giant mass of noodles in your stockpot.
When you are ready to cook the noodles, bring a big stockpot of water to a boil, heavily salt the water (it should taste like salty seawater), and toss the noodles in. Take a noodle out every 30 seconds and taste to check for al dente doneness. Fresh pasta cooks very quickly. Drain and toss with olive oil or the following sauce.
To make the sauce: Throw the shells in a food processor and grind them up into little pieces. Place the ground up shells in a saucepan and add the cream and tarragon. Simmer for 5 minutes, then strain out the shells by pouring the sauce through a fine meshed sieve. Season with salt and pepper, and pour onto your pasta.