18 Egg Yolk Pasta
Home-made pasta is a gift. This one is a little luxury to make for the people you love – family, friends, and yourself.
Why should you make fresh pasta? It’s extravagant and special. It tastes deeply fatty, silky, and chewy from the eggs. You’d be surprised at the reaction people have that you made pasta for them. It’s a great skill to have and I find the process to be meditative. You can also customize the flavour, such as incorporating black pepper, basil, spinach, or anything you want right into the dough.
You can use this for a wide variety of fresh pasta shapes, like pappardelle, tagliatelle, or angel hair pasta. It’s perfect for dishes with butter or oil based sauces, like Cacio e Pepe, Aglio e Olio, or my winter favourite dish, brown butter fried sage and Parmesan. I use fresh pasta most often to make lasagna noodles for the Lasagna of Sadness. That’s a dish I make for people I love when they’re going through a particularly hard time.
If this is your first time making fresh pasta, remember this is a skill that gets better over time. It’s a learning experience! Have a bag of dry pasta around for a backup and it will be a much more relaxed pasta making experience. I believe in you.
Ingredients
It is difficult to provide a precise measurement since your eggs will vary quite a bit in size. I would recommend you separate your eggs first, weigh them, and figure out the rest of your ingredients based on the eggs. Using a kitchen scale will help you make this consistently ever time.
18 egg yolks, mine weighed around 300 grams, using US Large eggs
120% of the egg weight in flour, so for 300g of egg yolks that’s 360 grams of flour (3 cups)
0.5% of the egg weight in salt, so for 300g of egg yolks that’s 1.5 grams (2 big pinches)
5% of the egg weight in olive oil, so for 300g of egg yolks that’s 15g (1-2 tbsp)
Additional flour for dusting (optionally use semolina flour for better noodle separation)
Does 00 flour matter? What kind of eggs?
Since there are so few ingredients the ingredient quality matters a lot. All of the water in this recipe comes from egg yolks, the dough is 45% egg yolk by weight. Please use the best egg yolks you can find. Many recipes call for 00 flour, which is very finely milled flour that can absorb more moisture without becoming tacky. I used all purpose flour, because it’s more readily available. In the choice between spending $5 on 00 flour or $5 on better eggs, I will spend more on the eggs every time.
Upgrading to 00 flour will improve the texture and elasticity. Upgrading the egg yolks will change the colour, flavour , and have a large impact on the environment and health of the farming system.
Equipment
Pasta machine – this dough is too dry to use with a rolling pin; look for a soft pasta dough recipe if you want to roll it out with a rolling pin. An entry level machine for $25 will work great and that’s what I used for the last 10 years.
Kitchen scale
Bench scraper
Fork
2 medium bowls, 1 small bowl
Plastic wrap
Method
Separate your egg yolks
Bring your eggs out of the fridge 30 minutes before starting so this is a more comfortable temperature for the process. Place your egg yolk bowl on the kitchen scale and zero it out.
The most reliable method to separate egg yolks is with 2 medium bowls and 1 small bowl.
Crack each egg into the small bowl and use your hand to scoop the yolk out. Place the yolk into one medium bowl, and the white into another. Repeat for all 18 eggs.
The small bowl acts like an insurance policy: if you break an egg yolk you can either set that egg aside to cook later, or use a piece of egg shell to scoop the egg yolk out. The egg yolk is attracted to the egg shell, so this does a very good job.
Once you become more comfortable with this process, you can crack all 18 eggs into one large bowl and scoop the yolks out one at a time. This will be substantially faster.
Measure the final weight of your egg yolks and adjust your flour. Using US Size Large eggs, 18 egg yolks should be roughly 300 grams. Your flour should be 120% of your egg yolk weight. For example, if your eggs are 315 grams use 378 grams of flour (318 * 1.2 = 378). It’s better to have more flour than less in this instance.
Reserve your egg whites for a later use, such as meringue, macaron, omelettes, frittatas, or angel food cake. Egg whites freeze well. Freeze them in an ice cube tray to get roughly the amount that equals one egg.
Mix the dough
On a clean counter or work surface, place your weighed flour in a mound. Then use a bowl or your hands to make a well that will fit the egg yolks. Add the egg yolks, salt, and olive oil. Alternatively, you can do this in a bowl.
Using a fork, gently bring in flour from the side walls into the centre of the egg mixture. Stir to combine. Once the flour has been integrated into the egg, repeat this process by gentle bringing more flour into the centre. At some point this will become thick and paste like, at which point you should switch to a bench scraper. Use your bench scraper to chop, scoop, and fold the flour until most of the dry bits are integrated.
Switch to your hands and begin kneading the dough together.
This is intentionally a very dry dough. By being a dry dough it will be easier to run through your pasta machine, cut into noodles, and store for later use. However, the first 2 minutes of kneading will feel very difficult and like the dough will not come together. Do not add water.
After the dough forms you will have some dry, unincorporated bits of flour. Use your bench scraper to move these aside and they will not mix into the dough. If there are no dry spots, or your dough seems sticky, add more flour. A sticky dough will be very hard to work with later.
In total you’ll knead the dough for 10-15 minutes. It’s hard work, but if you get tired you can wrap the dough in plastic and take a 5 minute break. You want to knead the dough until it has a uniform texture, like Play-Doh. It’s done when it stops changing.
Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and leave it to rest for 30 minutes.
From dough to noodles
After the dough has rested, divide it into 4-8 pieces. Smaller pieces will be easier to work with if this is your first time using a pasta machine. This dough is too dry to roll out with a rolling pin; use another recipe if you don’t have a pasta machine.
Leaving the remaining dough covered, and working with one piece at a time, use your hands or a rolling pin to flatten the piece you are working with. Run this through your pasta machine at its widest setting.
Fold the dough into thirds so it is roughly the width of your pasta machine and run it through at the same wide setting. This step is called laminating and helps the strength of the dough.
Continue to run your pasta dough through the machine, reducing the thickness setting each time, until you reach your desired thickness. For most noodles, like tagliatelle, you will want it to be thin enough to see a patterned kitchen towel through the surface. Remember that it will absorb water and become 2-3x as thick in the cooking process. For lasagna noodles, I prefer to go as thin as possible on my machine.
To slice your noodles on the machine, use the slicing attachment on your preferred setting. Otherwise, lightly flour the sheet of pasta, roll it up, and slice it with a knife. Shake the pasta out, being careful to separate all the noodles, and dust lightly with flour. Continue through the rest of your pasta dough.
Cooking fresh pasta noodles
Fresh pasta cooks fast – in 60 to 90 seconds, depending on the thickness of the dough. If you are serving this immediately with a sauce, have your sauce ready to go.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil and heavily salt the water (think: 1/4 cup of salt). Add in your fresh pasta noodles and cook until they are soft.
If you are cooking from the fridge or from frozen, the same cooking steps apply. If you are cooking from dry, you will need to adjust the cooking time based on how dry the noodles are.
Cooking fresh lasagna noodles
In Marcella Hazan’s Classics of Italian Cooking she introduces a technique to create the perfect texture for fresh noodles in lasagna.
You will need boiling, salted water
A large bowl filled with ice water
A large bowl filled with clean, cool water
A large amount of clean kitchen towels
Fresh lasagna noodle method
Place a few fresh lasagna noodles into boiling, salted water
After 60 seconds, immediately move them into the ice water to stop the cooking process
Rub some of the starch off the outside
Move the noodles from the ice water to the clean water and rub more starch off the outside
Remove each noodle and wring it out like a kitchen towel, the pasta is a lot more durable here than you think
Lay each noodle out on a clean kitchen towel to dry
This process helps the noodles keep a substantial amount of chew in the final cooked lasagna, as well as hold the layers more firmly together, while at the same time remaining super thin.
Yes, it is tedious. Yes, it is worth it.
Storing fresh pasta
Due to the high volume of egg yolks, leaving fresh pasta at room temperature comes with potential health risks from salmonella. If you trust the eggs you’re buying (such as from vaccinated chickens), you can dry the pasta at room temperature. If you’re not going to cook your pasta within 2 hours of making it, I would suggest one of the following fresh pasta storage methods.
Storing fresh pasta in the fridge: at the dough resting stage
You can store fresh pasta dough in the fridge before rolling it out, for up to 2 days. However, due to the high volume of egg yolks in this recipe the exterior of the dough will oxidize. That means it will turn a grey/brown colour that will be very confusing if you’re not expecting it. This has no effect on the flavour, it will still taste great. Once you begin to roll the dough out the oxidized surface will incorporate into the dough and the bright yellow colour will return.
Storing fresh pasta in the fridge: cut noodles
You can store fresh pasta noodles in the fridge for up to 2 days. The moisture of the fridge environment may cause the noodles to clump up together, so if you are going to do this I would recommend using semolina flour for dusting the noodles instead of all purpose flour. The coarse grains of semolina flour are more like to remain separate. 00 flour is more likely to clump.
Storing fresh pasta in the freezer
Place your nests of pasta on a baking sheet (I use a 1/4 sheet tray) and place in the freezer to freeze solid. Once frozen, move the pasta nests into a freezer bag. Freezing the pasta nests individually makes it easier to separate them later and will help reduce freezer burn. Use within 6 months.
Drying fresh pasta
Leaving pasta to dry at room temperature can come with health risks. A safer option is to dehydrate your pasta in the oven. Set your oven as low as it can go, such as 135F. After 2-4 hours your pasta will be dehydrated and the eggs will be pasteurized. Keep in an airtight container and use within 3 months.