Pantry Lovers Series: How to Make Fresh Pasta and Pesto From Scratch (Faster Than You Think)

PANTRY LOVERS SERIES – Make your own pasta (with pesto!)

Homemade pasta with homemade pesto is fast food.

Really? Am I smoking tea tree with a side of earnestness? Perhaps I have too much time to poke around in gardens and lacto-ferment pickles and handmake every last piece of family clothing including handstitched underwear?

Actually, no. I’ve never made underwear. But I do frequently poke around in gardens and I’m a huge fan of lacto-fermentation and, for a fast dinner, YOU CAN MAKE PASTA FROM SCRATCH. I promise.

Start with the sauce. What have you got that’s green? We grow wild rocket, and it really is wild. Grows like mad. I’ve usually got a few nuts on hand (edible as opposed to immediate family members, also handy), and if you happen to have a scraping of parmesan, a bit of lemon left over from that cup of tea you made, garlic and some olive oil, you’re all good. You may not even have to shop for this meal.

The recipe for my Basil Pesto is below, but if you’re feeling creative you don’t really need a recipe. Try freestyling with a couple of big handfuls of greens of some kind (leftover carrot tops, beetroot greens, kale) plus some kind of toasted nut, some lemon juice, minced garlic and salt and a good stream of olive oil. Whiz it up. Taste it. Lovely. You’re done.

Right. We’re here for the pasta. Basic egg pasta is always simply 100 g plain (all-purpose) flour plus one egg per person. I have a family of five, so I typically times this by five, but you can make as little or as much as you like. Fresh pasta freezes well.

Engage child labour only if you have an extra twenty minutes plus clean-up time. Do not be deceived by willingness and enthusiasm. Small hands will slow you down and frustrate the bejaysus out of you if you’re in a hurry. Ah, yes. Good for their maths. Teach them to cook, they said. Oh, for sure. Not when the wheels are falling off and you’re looking for fast food though, right?

Pasta-making machines: excellent if you have one but totally not necessary. You can roll out your pasta dough nice and thin with a rolling pin, then roll it in a loose cylinder and slice into ribbons with a knife. Extremely satisfying.

Fresh homemade pasta cooks in boiling water for 2–3 minutes, and that’s not some mad make-it-from-scratch lunatic exaggeration. It’s literally 2–3 minutes. If you can mix up flour and eggs and get it rolled out quick smart (and go do something else while you rest it), you’ve got fresh pasta in the same time it took to open a bag and boil it for 12 minutes. It’s not only tastier – and you wear that earnest glow of someone who just cooked pasta from scratch dammit – it’s much more nutritious. The fresher the flour the better, ideally unbleached, and woohoo for good carbohydrate.

Fast food. And you didn’t have to drive to get it, no animal lived in misery to supply it and no kid worked for some compromised multinational to serve it. It’ll fill you up and hopefully someone else will clean up the kitchen.

Egg Pasta
Serves 5
Ingredients

500 g (3 ⅓  cups) plain (all-purpose) flour
5 eggs

Method

Place the flour in a large bowl, make a well in the centre and add the eggs while whisking with a fork. Incorporate the flour with the fork, and then with your hands, take it out, put it on the bench and knead it until it’s really smooth. Wrap in plastic wrap and rest at room temperature for half an hour.
Divide the pasta dough into large pieces and just work with one at a time, keeping the others covered (with one dry tea towel on the pasta and another damp tea towel over the top) so as not to dry it out. Using a pasta machine, roll and re-roll from the largest number to the smallest on the machine, until it is 1–2 mm thin. Or roll as thin as you can with a rolling pin, keeping the dough well-floured.
You can cut the pasta however you like – into long, thin noodles, or into chunky strips – just keep them well scattered with flour to stop it all sticking together.
Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to the boil, then reduce it to a simmer. Cook the pasta (in batches if there’s too much) until it is just cooked and it floats to the surface, about 2–3 minutes, and remove with a slotted spoon.

Note

If you have a food processor, the simplest way to make this recipe is to put the flour and eggs together in the bowl of the processor and whizz until they are a lovely amalgamated pasta dough. Take out the dough, put it on the bench and knead it until it’s really smooth. Wrap in plastic wrap/wax wrap and rest in the fridge for half an hour.
Pasta freezes really well. Twirl little well-floured ‘nests’ of pasta with a fork or tongs and pop into a sealed bag and freeze. Then you can cook them from frozen, straight in the boiling water.

Basil Pesto

Never underestimate basil pesto. With a jar in the fridge you’ve got a fast-food dinner almost made, to stir through pasta (recipe above!) It’s also delicious on toast under fresh tomato, dobbed onto pizza with mozzarella and sundried tomatoes, you can make a salad dressing out of it, toss hot steamed veggies through it, stir it through couscous, bake it into bread and add a spoonful to everything from mashed potato to soups and stews for a flavour hit. I try to never be without it and in the depths of winter if I don’t have any basil, I’ll substitute spinach, kale or rocket.

Makes 1 x 300 g jar

Ingredients

60 g (2 oz) parmesan cheese
bunch of fresh basil or 100 g (2 cups) basil leaves
2 garlic cloves, minced
40 g (¼ cup) pine nuts, lightly toasted
125 ml (½ cup) olive oil
½ teaspoon salt

Method

Place the cheese into a food processor and blitz until fine.
Add the basil, garlic and pine nuts and blitz.
Add the oil and blitz again.
Taste and season with salt.
If it’s too thick you can add 1 tablespoon water at a time until it’s the consistency you like.
To store, scrape the pesto into a clean jar and pour a thin layer of oil over the top before refrigerating. It will keep for 2 weeks in the fridge.

Recipes adapted from Fiona Weir’s book “From Scratch” published by Hardie Grant 2022, photography by Alan Benson