How to Master Mom’s Pasta

When I was a kid, pasta night meant ground beef, a jar of sauce, and a box of noodles boiled a little too long. I loved it, I really did.

When I was EIGHT.

Real pasta — the kind you’re about to learn to make — is an ENTIRELY different food. Smooth, silky dough, cut into the right shape, tossed with a sauce made from scratch and designed to match it. That’s what this unit is about. Pasta the way God intended.

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CONTENTS AND QUICK LINKS

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History and Background: Who Invented Pasta?

Here’s the honest answer: nobody can prove who invented pasta first, and that’s not a cop-out — it’s the actual state of the evidence. The word “pasta” just means “paste” in Italian, a nod to the dough itself: flour plus water or egg. Those ingredients have been sitting around since the dawn of agriculture, which makes it almost impossible to point to one place and say “here, this is where it started.”

What we do know: an Etruscan tomb from around the 4th century B.C. — that’s over 300 years before the Roman Empire existed — shows figures who appear to be making something very close to pasta. Meanwhile, the Chinese were making noodle-like foods as early as 3000 B.C., thousands of years before that Etruscan tomb was ever painted. Noodles most likely originated in Central Asia and spread outward from there — nobody’s entirely sure how they made it to Europe, but nomadic Arab traders are one of the leading theories, alongside the same Sicily route below.

Myth-busting: You’ve probably heard that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China in the 1200s. Almost every food historian agrees this is false. Italians were already making pasta before Marco Polo ever left for Asia. The story likely stuck around because it’s a better tale than “traders introduced it slowly over centuries” — but better stories aren’t always true ones.

The most solid evidence for pasta’s arrival in Italy specifically points to the Arab world. Arab traders and settlers introduced dried pasta to Sicily around the 9th century — dried noodles made sense on long desert trade routes because they didn’t spoil the way fresh food did. From Sicily, the technique spread north through Italy over the following centuries.

Fun fact: Greek mythology has its own pasta origin story. Legend credits Vulcan, the god of fire and forge, with inventing a device that pressed dough into long strings — essentially the first spaghetti. Take it as folklore, not fact, but it tells you something: humans have been trying to explain where pasta came from for a very long time.

Once pasta took hold in Italy, geography shaped how each region used it. The south — Naples, Sicily, the coast — had the hot, dry climate durum wheat needs, and access to the sea for drying. That’s why dried pasta, tossed with tomatoes, olive oil, and seafood, became the southern tradition. The north — Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, Lombardy — had richer farmland, more dairy and eggs, and cooler weather that made fresh pasta practical to dry-store for shorter periods. That’s the home of fresh egg pasta: tagliatelle, tortellini, ravioli.

That single climate difference — hot and dry in the south, cooler and richer in the north — is the reason “Italian pasta” isn’t really one tradition. It’s two, shaped by geography.

Pasta Comes to America

Pasta didn’t arrive in America through Italian immigration first — that part surprises most people. English travelers touring Italy discovered pasta and brought the idea home to England, and English colonists carried that habit to America: boil noodles for a good half hour, then smother them in cream sauce and cheese.

Thomas Jefferson gets real credit too. During his years as ambassador to France in the 1780s, Jefferson developed a taste for what he called “macaroni” — a catch-all term back then for pretty much any pasta shape. He liked it enough to bring a pasta-making machine home with him in 1789, and when his supply ran low, he had a friend in Naples ship him more.

Industrial pasta production in America started in Brooklyn in 1848, when a French pasta maker built the first factory and dried his spaghetti strands directly on the rooftop in the sun. But pasta didn’t become a genuine American staple until the late 19th century, when a wave of Italian immigrants — most from Naples — settled in the U.S. and brought serious pasta-making culture with them. We’ve been making spaghetti here ever since.

Pasta and Noodles Around the World

Italy didn’t invent the idea of “flour, water, and a shape.” Nearly every culture that grows wheat, rice, or buckwheat developed some version of it, long before Italy and Asia ever traded with each other.

• China has its own deep noodle tradition, going back over 4,000 years — wheat noodles in the north, rice noodles in the south, where rice grows better than wheat.
• Japan makes udon (thick wheat noodles) and soba (buckwheat noodles), each treated as its own craft with its own rules for texture and broth pairing.
• Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand) relies heavily on rice noodles, since rice — not wheat — is the region’s staple grain.
• Eastern Europe has its own dumpling tradition — Polish pierogi, German spaetzle, Ashkenazi Jewish kreplach — dough wrapped around a filling or cut into small pieces, the same basic idea as ravioli, built independently.
• Greece has orzo, a rice-shaped pasta that shows up in soups and pilafs across the region.
• North Africa and the Middle East use couscous, tiny steamed pellets of semolina, which is technically a pasta even though it doesn’t look like one.

The takeaway: “flour + water/egg, shaped and cooked” is one of the most universal ideas in food. Every culture with access to grain found its own way to it.

There are two basic kinds of pasta available in America: fresh and dried. Before we get into what they’re made from and how to cook each one, let’s do a quick overview of how they actually differ:

• Fresh pasta cooks VERY quickly — only a few minutes. Dried pasta takes between 8 and 12 minutes in simmering (190°F) water.
• Fresh pasta is frequently flavored with olive oil, eggs, fresh herbs, and vegetables. Dried pasta is RARELY flavored — and honestly, you can’t really taste the flavor even when it is.
• Both fresh and dried pasta are done when they feel firm to the bite, or al dente. Both should retain a bit of “chew.”
• Most varieties of fresh pasta float when they’re done cooking; dried pasta does not.

Keep these differences in mind as we get into ingredients and cooking — every choice you make with pasta comes back to one of these four facts.

Quick myth to clear up before we go further: some people think fresh pasta is automatically “better” than dried. That idea is backwards, and it’s a pretty recent one — it took off in the 1990s and 2000s once food shows made “fresh” sound fancy and “boxed” sound cheap. In most of Italy, dried pasta isn’t the lesser option — it’s the everyday staple, and it’s what a huge share of the country’s most famous dishes are built on. Fresh isn’t better. It’s just different, and it’s for a different job.

Fresh pasta has a limited shelf life and needs to be refrigerated. Dried pasta is good for up to 2 years at room temperature — that durability is the entire reason dried pasta became the traveler’s and trader’s staple in the first place, all the way back to those early Arab trade routes.

Because fresh pasta cooks so quickly (90 seconds to 3 minutes!), there’s no real reason to cook it ahead of time.

If you make more fresh pasta than you need, don’t let it go to waste — it freezes well. Lay the shaped pasta out in a single layer on a lightly floured sheet tray, making sure pieces don’t touch each other, and freeze until solid. Once frozen, you can transfer it into a bag or container without it clumping into one giant mass. The best part: frozen pasta goes straight into boiling water with no thawing required. Same rule applies to dried pasta you make yourself — once it’s fully dried through, it keeps for months in a cool, dry spot, just like the box stuff.

Commercially-made dried pasta only has two ingredients: durum semolina flour and water. That’s it. Two ingredients, and it lasts on a shelf for years. Pay attention to that — it matters later. Fresh pasta adds eggs, salt, and usually olive oil to that base.

Semolina Flour

Semolina flour, made from durum wheat, is the classic, traditional option for pasta making. It’s what Italians have used for hundreds of years, and if you want the best pasta taste and texture, it’s unbeatable.

Semolina has a much coarser texture than other flours — it actually looks and feels a bit like cornmeal — because it’s the coarsely ground endosperm of durum wheat. That deep yellow color comes from a high concentration of carotenoids, the same compounds responsible for the brilliant color of carrots, mangoes, and apricots.

That yellow color is a classic Italian pasta feature. But here’s what actually matters: semolina is a “hard” flour with a very high gluten content — over 13%. That gluten content is what gives your pasta the best shape it can possibly have.

Tipo 00

Fresh pasta — especially the delicate shapes meant for light sauces — is usually made from fine-milled Tipo 00 flour instead. Tipo 00 is the most commonly used flour in Italian households for soft egg pasta. “Tipo 00” is just an Italian term describing how finely the flour is milled.

Here’s what matters: gluten levels in Tipo 00 are LOW — anywhere from 12% down to well below 6%. That’s less gluten than good old AP flour has. What that means for you: you cannot make a thick, rustic pasta out of Tipo 00. It would fall apart while it cooks. It doesn’t have the backbone for it.

Why this trips people up: “00” isn’t a protein rating — it’s an Italian milling grade. It just tells you the flour is ground extremely fine, almost like powder. Protein content is a separate question entirely, and it’s protein that turns into gluten once you start mixing and kneading. Gluten is the stretchy, elastic web that gives dough its structure. No gluten, no structure — just wet flour paste.

You cannot swap semolina and Tipo 00 for each other and expect the same result. Try rolling a thick, rustic shape out of Tipo 00 and it will fall apart on you — it doesn’t have the gluten strength to hold. Try rolling semolina paper-thin for delicate ravioli and it will fight you the entire way, and probably crack before you get there.

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Look at any two fresh pasta recipes and you’ll notice the egg ratio is never the same. Some use mostly whole eggs. Some use almost all yolks. That’s not random — it’s a deliberate choice that changes three things: color, texture, and strength.

• Egg yolks are packed with fat and a natural emulsifier called lecithin, along with the carotenoid pigments that give pasta its rich yellow color. Fat coats the gluten strands as they form, which weakens gluten development slightly — the payoff is a softer, silkier, more tender dough.
• Egg whites are mostly water and protein, with almost no fat. Water hydrates the flour and helps gluten form fully. More whole eggs (whites + yolks) means more water and more protein feeding the gluten network — the payoff is a stronger, firmer dough that holds its shape better.

So a dough built mostly on egg yolks — like a rich raviolo dough — will be tender, deeply golden, and silky, but structurally a bit more delicate. A dough built on more whole eggs will be paler, firmer, and stronger — better suited to shapes that need to hold together under more handling.

If you need a starting point before you start adjusting for texture, here’s the standard rule of thumb: 100 grams of 00 flour for every 1 egg. Scale that up or down depending on how many portions you need, then start adjusting the egg-to-yolk ratio once you know what texture you’re after.

Once you’ve settled on your flour and your egg ratio, you’ve got dough — but raw dough isn’t ready to roll yet. That’s the next step.

Why egg pasta turns gray-green: Egg yolks contain iron and sulfur compounds. Once the dough is cut and exposed to air, those compounds slowly oxidize — the same basic reaction that browns a cut apple. It’s harmless at 12–18 hours; just knead the dough again and the discoloration disappears. Held much longer than that, the dough develops a bad flavor along with the color and needs to be thrown out.

Making the Dough: The Resting Stage

In general, making pasta dough is a little bit like kneading bread. The last step is the one young cooks think they can skip when they’re in a hurry, and it’s the one that matters most. When flour is hydrated and kneaded, the gluten strands you just built tighten up and resist stretching. If you try to roll your pasta dough in the machine right after kneading, it fights back — it tears instead of stretching thin.

Resting solves this. Left alone, wrapped tightly, those tight gluten strands relax over time. That relaxation is exactly what lets the dough roll out thin and smooth instead of ripping. Most doughs need 15–30 minutes of rest before rolling; always follow the specific time in your recipe. Rested dough should feel smooth, elastic, and just barely moist.

Not sure if you’ve kneaded enough? Use the dimple test. Press one finger into the dough ball. If the dent springs back toward you fairly quickly, the gluten’s developed and you’re ready to wrap it up and let it rest. If your finger just leaves a dent that stays put, keep kneading.

HARD RULE: Never roll out cold, unhydrated pasta dough. Let it come fully to room temperature first, or it will crack instead of stretch.

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Rested dough doesn’t turn into pasta by itself — it has to be rolled thin and shaped, and there are two completely different ways to get there. Most of what you’re cooking this unit gets rolled and cut by hand using a machine you crank yourself. But some shapes never touch a rolling pin at all — they’re pushed through a metal die under serious pressure, a process called extrusion.

Rolling Dough on a Hand-Crank Machine

Once your dough has rested, don’t reach for a rolling pin — a hand-crank pasta machine does the job faster, thinner, and more evenly than your arms ever will. Here’s how you actually run one.

Machine Setup and Prep

1. Clamp the machine securely to the edge of your table or counter. If it wobbles while you’re cranking, it’s not clamped tight enough — fix that before you start, not after the dough tears.
2. Divide your rested dough into smaller, workable chunks. Don’t try to feed the whole batch through at once.
3. Keep whatever dough you’re not working with wrapped tightly in plastic. It dries out fast sitting on the counter, and dry edges crack the second they hit the rollers.
4. Flatten each chunk by hand or with a small rolling pin until it’s roughly the width of the machine’s opening. It just needs to fit — you’re not rolling it thin yet.

Kneading and Smoothing (Laminating)

1. Set the machine to its widest opening — usually marked 0 or 1.
2. Crank the dough through, catching the sheet in your open palm as it comes out the other side.
3. Fold the sheet like a letter, into thirds.
4. Run it back through that same widest setting. Repeat this fold-and-roll two to three times. This isn’t just rolling — it’s kneading. Each pass builds a stronger, smoother sheet, so don’t rush past this part to get to the thin stuff.

Rolling Thinner

1. Move the dial down one setting, thinner than before.
2. Feed the sheet straight through — no more folding. Support the sheet with one hand as it lengthens while you crank with the other; a sheet dragging on the counter picks up flour, lint, and bad habits.
3. If the dough starts feeling sticky, dust it lightly with flour or semolina. Lightly. You’re not breading a chicken cutlet.
4. Keep dropping down one setting at a time until you hit your target thickness — usually setting 5 to 7 for long noodles like fettuccine. If the sheet gets too long to control, cut it in half. A pasta sheet on the floor helps nobody.

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Extruders: Why We Don’t Have One (And Why That Matters Anyway)

We can’t afford to purchase a commercial pasta extruder — and honestly, why would we spend upwards of $18,000 on a machine only a handful of students would ever touch in their entire culinary arts education? Extruded shapes like macaroni or rigatoni are made by forcing stiff dough through a metal die under real mechanical pressure. Professional extruders start in the hundreds of dollars and climb into the thousands fast, which is exactly why almost no restaurant — and essentially no home cook — owns one either. Rolled and cut is a hand skill you’re about to learn this unit; extruded is a machine’s job, plain and simple.

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Pasta Shapes You Should Know

You don’t need to memorize all of these, but you should recognize them and know roughly how each one gets used.

And here’s something most people never think about: pasta shapes are named for what they look like, in plain Italian. Orecchiette means “little ears.” Farfalle means “butterflies.” Vermicelli means “little worms” — appetizing, right? Once you know this, the names stop being vocabulary you have to memorize and start being descriptions you already understand. Keep that in mind as you go through the glossary below.

Knowing the shapes is only half the job. The other half is knowing how to actually cook them — and dried and fresh pasta don’t play by the same rules.

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DRIED PASTA

The standard advice — and it’s not wrong — is to keep dried pasta at a full rolling boil for the entire cook time. That’s accepted kitchen wisdom, and you’ll see it on every pasta box and in most cookbooks. It works.

But here’s what we’re actually going to do in this kitchen: the off-heat method. Bring your water to a full rolling boil, dump in the pasta, and stir vigorously until the water returns to a boil. Then put the lid on, kill the heat completely, and set a timer for about 10 minutes — no watching, no stirring, no active heat.

Why teach the off-heat version instead of just telling you to keep it boiling? Because leaving dried pasta at a hard rolling boil for the full cook time is asking for trouble. It boils over the second you look away, it sticks to the bottom of the pot more than you’d think, and if the water level gets low, you can genuinely scorch the starch on the bottom. It’s also easier to lose track of time and overcook a whole pot. None of that happens with the off-heat method — there’s no active boil left to babysit once the lid goes on, which makes it safer and far more forgiving.

This isn’t cutting corners, either. Pasta doesn’t cook because water is boiling — it cooks because the pasta reaches a certain temperature for long enough to gelatinize its starch, and that temperature range starts well below boiling. A covered pot full of just-boiled water holds more than enough heat to finish the job on its own. Line cooks and home cooks have been using this method for decades specifically because it works and it’s harder to mess up than actively babysitting a boil.

One catch: this method still depends on that initial full boil and the vigorous stir to set the pasta’s surface starch correctly, same as we covered above. Skip that step and dump pasta into water that’s only simmering, and you’re back to the gummy, uneven texture we already talked about. The rule about needing a real boil to start still holds — this technique just proves you don’t have to keep it boiling the whole way through.

FRESH PASTA

Everything above is about dried pasta. Fresh pasta plays by different rules entirely.

Dried pasta wants a full rolling boil. Fresh pasta wants something gentler — a spot somewhere between a bare simmer (about 190°F) and a full rolling boil (212°F). Some food scientists will tell you pasta doesn’t even need water that hot to cook through — the starch inside pasta actually gelatinizes around 180°F. Either way, the point stands: fresh pasta doesn’t need your water throwing itself against the lid.

Why gentler? Fresh pasta is delicate — thinner, softer, and far more fragile than anything made from tough semolina and water. A violent rolling boil knocks fragile ribbons and shapes against the sides of the pot and against each other, which is how you end up with torn noodles and broken edges. It’s even more of a problem with stuffed shapes like ravioli and tortellini: boil those too hard and you risk blowing them apart at the seams, dumping the filling into your pot and curdling any cheese that leaks out. A gentle boil keeps the shape intact and the filling where it belongs.

Fresh pasta also cooks fast — usually 90 seconds to 3 minutes, depending on thickness and shape. Stuffed pasta runs a little longer, closer to 2 to 4 minutes, since the filling needs to heat through too. Either way, this is not a “walk away and come back” situation. You watch fresh pasta the entire time it’s in the water.

Here’s how fresh pasta tells you it’s ready: it floats. Raw pasta dough is denser than water, which is why it sinks the moment it hits the pot. As it cooks, two things happen at once. First, the starch inside gelatinizes and absorbs water, which lowers the pasta’s density. Second — and this one surprises people — the eggs in the dough are full of natural emulsifiers that trap tiny air pockets while you’re mixing and kneading. Those air pockets stay locked inside the pasta as it cooks, and they add buoyancy on top of the density drop. Once the combination of “less dense” and “more buoyant” tips the scale, the pasta rises to the surface. That’s not a coincidence or an old wives’ tale — it’s genuine food science, and it’s one of the most reliable doneness signals in the kitchen. When your pasta starts floating, start tasting.

Here’s a fun fact about Chef Bates’ least favorite restaurant: Olive Garden has reportedly been known to skip salting their pasta water entirely. Now you know why their pasta always tastes like it’s missing something. Aside from taste. Or goodness. Or any other redeeming quality.

Historical footnote: the earliest written reference to boiling dough comes from the Jerusalem Talmud, in a debate over whether boiled dough counts as unleavened bread under Jewish law. Pasta was almost certainly boiled well before that text was written — but it’s the oldest surviving mention of the method that’s been feeding people ever since.

Worth knowing, even if it won’t change what you do in this kitchen: food scientist J. Kenji López-Alt, who runs the Food Lab at Serious Eats, has actually challenged the “huge pot of water” rule. His argument is that pasta doesn’t need to “swim” — the water’s real job is transferring heat, not diluting anything, so a much smaller amount of water works just fine. It’s a good example of a kitchen “rule” that turns out to be more habit than science. We’re still going to use the full-pot method in this class, because it’s the standard you’ll be expected to know professionally — but it’s worth knowing the rule has been challenged.

Al dente (ahl-DEN-tay) means “to the tooth” — firm enough that you feel real resistance when you bite it, with no raw flour taste. That resistance isn’t vague or subjective. Two separate things are happening inside the noodle at the same time, and both of them matter.

The starch side. Pasta is mostly starch, packed into tiny granules. As the pasta heats up in the water, those granules absorb water and swell — a process called gelatinization. Gelatinization starts around 140–150°F and is essentially complete by 180–190°F. This is what makes the noodle soft and edible instead of chalky and raw.

The protein side. This is the part that actually gets skipped most places, and it’s the real source of “bite.” Pasta dough is full of gluten — the protein network you already know from making the dough itself. As the noodle heats up, that protein denatures: it unfolds and firms up, the same basic transformation that happens to egg whites when you fry an egg. This denatured protein network doesn’t turn soft like the starch does — it tightens and holds structure. That structure is what your teeth are actually pushing against when you bite into al dente pasta. Take away the protein, and all you’d have is soft, structureless starch paste.

Al dente is the exact point where both of these processes have gone far enough on the outside of the noodle — starch fully gelatinized, protein fully set — while the very center hasn’t quite caught up yet, leaving a faint trace of firmness right at the core. Cut a piece of pasta in half at true al dente and you’ll sometimes see a tiny pale dot or ring right at the center — that’s the visual proof of exactly what we just described, the underdone core surrounded by the fully cooked outer layer. Push past that point and both processes finish all the way through: the starch keeps absorbing water and the protein structure starts to break down along with it, which is exactly how you end up with mushy pasta. Al dente isn’t a matter of taste — it’s the one specific moment where texture and structure are both at their best, together.

That’s the last piece of the cooking process. What’s left is the part most people never think about at all: which sauce actually belongs with which shape.

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Ever notice a restaurant never serves bolognese over spaghetti, or rigatoni with a delicate cream sauce? That’s not the chef being fussy. Grab the wrong pasta for a sauce and you’ll either end up with a soupy mess at the bottom of the bowl or a sauce so heavy it drowns everything underneath it. There’s an actual rule here, and once you know it, you’ll never randomly grab a pasta shape again.

• Long, flat strands like fettuccine have a large, smooth surface. A light cream sauce coats that surface evenly and clings without pooling. A heavy, chunky ragù would just slide right off — nothing for it to grab onto.
• Extruded, ridged shapes like rigatoni or penne have grooves and hollow centers built specifically to trap thick sauce. A heavy meat ragù gets physically caught inside and along the ridges. Pour that same ragù over thin, smooth spaghetti and most of it just falls to the bottom of the bowl.
• Filled pasta like ravioli or tortellini already has flavor packed inside. A heavy sauce on the outside competes with the filling instead of supporting it — that’s why filled pasta gets only a light butter, oil, or cream sauce.

Here’s the rule in practice, dish by dish: carbonara is always dried spaghetti — never fresh. Bolognese is traditionally served over fresh tagliatelle. Ravioli is fresh, full stop; nobody stuffs dried pasta. Cacio e pepe runs on dried spaghetti or tonnarelli. Put it simply: no nonna would serve tortellini out of a dried box, and no Roman chef would make carbonara with fresh pasta. The pairing isn’t a suggestion — it’s tradition doing its job.

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The biggest mistake young cooks make is this: boiling pasta, draining it, dumping a big ol’ tongful on a plate, then pouring a cup or two of red sauce over the top. Restaurants never do this. Why?

The Science Behind the Mistake

• Noodles shed water: Hot, plain pasta on a plate continues to release steam and moisture. This water pools underneath, diluting your sauce into a runny mess.
• Surface tension rejects sauce: Plain pasta surfaces are slick with starches. Without the friction of tossing them together over heat, the sauce slides right off the noodles.
• Cold layers: The sauce sits on top and cools down quickly, while the trapped pasta underneath turns sticky, clumpy, and gummy.

What Tossing Actually Does

• The Starch Bind: Tossing pasta in the pan binds the sauce’s fats with the noodle’s starches, forcing them to emulsify into a velvety coating.
• The Absorption Trap: Hot noodles act like tiny sponges. When tossed in a simmering pan, they actively drink in the sauce’s flavor instead of just sitting under it.

Do This Instead:

1. Get your sauce cooking in a pan before your pasta is done — it should be ready and waiting, not the other way around.
2. Pull the pasta from the boiling water slightly before it’s fully al dente (a minute early is usually right).
3. Transfer the pasta directly into the sauce pan — a spider or tongs work better than dumping it through a full colander, since you want some water clinging to the noodles.
4. Add a splash of the reserved starchy pasta water and toss everything together over heat, letting the pasta finish cooking in the sauce.
5. Keep tossing until the sauce thickens slightly and coats every strand — adding more pasta water if it looks too thick, until you get a glossy, clinging finish.
6. Plate immediately. Sauced pasta doesn’t sit around very well. It gets grumpy.

Never rinse cooked pasta — it washes away the starch that makes this whole process work. Never coat pasta with oil “so it doesn’t stick” after cooking — that same oil coating blocks sauce from clinging later. The ONLY time you would rinse and oil your pasta is if you are parboiling and chilling a TON of it for later service.

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Pasta Yields — Know Your Numbers

Before you scale any pasta recipe up or down, you need these numbers memorized cold — not looked up mid-service.

• Dried pasta roughly doubles in size (and weight) as it cooks.
• 1 pound dried pasta needs about 1 gallon of water.
• 1 pound dried pasta yields about 3 pounds cooked (that’s 8 cups or 6 servings)
• 1 pound fresh, uncooked pasta yields about 2–2.5 pounds cooked.
• 2 ounces dried pasta ≈ 1 cup cooked ≈ about 1 serving.

Recipe Deep Dives

Ready to cook? Here’s what’s coming this unit, in order:

• Spinach Fettuccine + Alfredo (Coming Week 3) — Egg-and-spinach dough, rolling technique, classic Alfredo sauce
• Gnocchi + Pesto (Coming Week 4) — Potato pasta, shaping, blistered cherry tomatoes, pesto history
• Cheese Ravioli + Marinara (Coming Week 5) — Shaping ravioli, four-cheese filling, marinara sauce
• Mushroom Tortellini + Brown Butter (Coming Week 5) — Mushroom duxelle filling, shaping tortellini, brown butter/cream sauce