Love to check out the threads on the board, now finally decided to make an account in the hope some of you could help me out.
Recently started and dough-making is going quite well now. In the below images I prepared as follows:
- Using Grano Duro 1 egg/100g and some water
- Kneed, work, the dough for about 5 minutes.
- Let it sit, airtight, on counter for 30 minutes
- Use a pin to roll it out to a thickness of 1 cm before starting to use the pastamaker's rollers
My problem is that the spaghetti is sticking together after emerging from the rollers. I'm able to pull apart some of it, but barely 1/3rd. The rest might as well be parpadelle… I'm in doubt on whether my methods are at play, or the pasta maker itself. With cooking, it's usually the latter I think 🙂
Pic 1: 'rough' sheet after rolling at medium thickness. I trim the edges after so that it's a nice square.
Pic 2: I feed it through the pasta machine. The spaghetti is coming out but with a 'fleece' in between. It's not easy to pull apart manually, it destroys the spaghetti strings.
Pic3: The alignment of the rollers in my pasta maker. At least I don't see them being misaligned too much, are they?
What have I tried so far:
– Different thinknesses of the sheet when I push them through the spaghetti rollers
– Adding olive oil, adding more water rather than egg
– Letting the dough sheets dry on counter for 30 min, and once for 3 hours (which was clearly too long)
Love to hear if you have advice!
Best Answer
I make a lot of pasta; I can tell by looking that your dough is just too moist to cut. Take the water out and just incorporate the egg in the dough more slowly, allow it to become a 'shaggy mess' while you mix it - don't add more moisture, just keep kneading, it'll hydrate evenly and turn into a well-behaved ball. I'm guessing you got to the 'mess' part and added more liquid, that was probably your mistake.
I'd also cut spaghetti on the #5 setting on your pasta machine (it looks like you did #4, but that could just be due to the dough looking 'sticky' and a little thicker than you rolled it).
Don't give up! If you want a reference for a 'semi-foolproof' dough, I put mine on Github so it could be useful. While mine is based on fine 00 milled standard flour, it would work equally well for durum with a little adjusting, and It describes the kneading and working in (way more) detail than would be appropriate to post.
Also, consider starting with simple 00 (double-awt) milled flour, or even AP flour so you get a feel for the dough, then tougher flours like durum / wheat / etc. Just get quality flour.