After You’re Done Making Bread, Try Making Fresh Pasta

In this series, we're showing off some of the coolest recipes, tips and tricks we've learned from chefs in the all-new Food Network Kitchen app.

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These days, it seems like just about everyone is making their own bread. In fact, Google searches for “how to make bread” soared in the month of March. Maybe the hype is about the satisfaction of nurturing a starter and using it to make dough. Or maybe it’s about the mouthwatering aroma of fresh bread baking in the oven. Or maybe, it’s a meditative project.

But what happens when you’ve baked all the breads — or worse, run out of yeast? If you’ve already tackled sourdough to focaccia to brioche, it’s time to give fresh pasta a try.

Making pasta is not like making bread. For one, you don’t have to tend to a starter for a week or wait for the dough to rise. And you can go from raw ingredients to a beautifully cooked pasta dish all in the same day. Plus, making pasta is fun and surprisingly easy!

In his Fresh Pasta class, available on the new Food Network Kitchen app, James Briscione breaks down how to transform eggs and flour into one of our most beloved carbs.

While using fancier flours like semolina can add some nice color to the noodles, James’ basic recipe can totally fly with something you probably already have sitting in your pantry – “00” flour, also known as all-purpose flour. And as long as you’ve got some eggs and salt around, you’re only a couple hours away from boiling a pot of your own pasta.

James mentions that to make the dough, you can easily bring the ingredients together with a food processor. But if you’re looking for something more hands-on – and fun – all you have to do is pour flour onto a clean surface and create a little hole, like a volcano, in the center of the pile. Then, you just crack some eggs into the hole and gently combine the ingredients with a fork. (Watching the process alone is mesmerizing.) In just minutes, everything comes together to create a ball of dough that, once formed, needs to rest for a minimum of 20 minutes before you can start using it.

And don’t worry. You don’t need a pasta machine to go from dough to noodles. Just roll it out with a rolling pin, to the thickness of paper, and cut into whatever width of pasta you’d like.

Once you give it a few tries, and get a load of your fresh pasta, it’ll be hard to go back. And if you try this recipe, use #wecook when you post it on Instagram and it might just show up on Food Network!

Good luck and keep the homemade carbs comin’.

Related Links:

How to Make Bread at Home Without an Oven

Basic Pasta Sauces to Know

You’ll Have New Bread Goals After You See This Sourdough Art