Tackling something new, in life and in cooking, is exciting for me. I love variety and learning new skills as the world just seems to open up wider when you put yourself out there to experience it. The flipside to the excitement, however, is the fear of failure or in this case the frustration of failure. If you read my last post you know my last pasta making attempt was indeed a failure. I waited until my friend Katie came over to give it a try again. I needed support, maybe a little hand holding/tissue box passing and she has made it before, hooray! Together it was easy peasy!
The finish product of freshly made-from-scratch pasta! Mission Accomplished 
Many problems have such simple solutions that upon solving you think you actually knew the answer the whole time, you just couldn’t trust yourself enough to get to it.
Starting the dough in a bowl is a whole lot cleaner than making it on the counter but certainly not as fun
It takes a bit of elbow grease, next time i will try the food processor method
This is already farther than I got last time. My previous attempt was using all semolina flour and not enough eggs to flour ratio. This time I used half semolina and half whole wheat and added an extra egg. Success!
So there are like 10 width settings on the pasta roller. You start at the widest opening and crank the dough through. After each pass or sometimes two passes through each setting the pasta gets thinner and longer.
The Mercato comes with two cutting widths. The wider is the fettuccine and the other is a smaller spaghetti width I believe. Other widths including a lasagna cutter can be purchased separately to attach to the roller as well.
1 cup of semolina flour
1 cup of whole wheat flour
3 large eggs
Yields 6 servings of pasta
…and a couple minutes later it’s ready to eat!
To jazz up the pasta I sautéed some seafood: shrimp, scallops and calamari. I added to that 1/2 stick of butter, 1 cup white wine, 1 cup clam juice to make a sauce. Separately I sautéed some mushrooms. Then combined all together seasoned with salt and pepper.
After all is done and we are ready to eat Katie tells me she doesn’t like seafood! Oopsie! We made her a separate seafood free plate of pasta. Thanks Katie for all your help and support in my quest for pasta redemption!
I am pleased to tell you I feel confident now in my pasta making skills and look forward to experiment with different flour and flavor combinations. Fear of failure be gone! My next adventure in new culinary achievements I’d like to tackle is making homemade yogurt. Who’s tried it?
I didn’t even know homemade yogurt was a thing! You’ll have to let us know how that turns out.
yeah I’m excited to give it a whirl, if it goes well then I might try making cheese too
When you come visit me you’ll have to do some taste testing!
Awesome! It looks so gorgeous, and you give me hope that maybe I can conquer it! We don’t have a pasta maker yet, but it is at the top of my kitchen gadget list for sure. And, again, you and I are totally on the same wavelength: I want to make yogurt too! We eat so much of it around here, and I want to see if I can make it, maybe with less sugar. There are really affordable yogurt makers out there ($40 maybe), but we haven’t bought one yet. Let me know how it goes! And then maybe we can try cheese making!
I think we should have been born in a different century 
I ordered a yogurt maker than has individual yogurt cups since Chris takes yogurt to work every day. You’re right it was just about $40 on Amazon. I also ordered a Nesco food dehydrator so can’t wait til my goodies come in the mail
I’ve been wanting to tackle making pasta for some time now! I’m inspired!
Well if you want to come over and make some with me you are welcome any time! It’s way more fun to make with someone