I make a fair amount of homemade pasta (Mostly Tagliatelle or Linguine), and I tend to cook it fresh, rather than drying it and cooking from dry; however, it tends to clump and stick together in the pan when cooking. What can I do to minimise this, and make my homemade pasta behave a little more like store bought fresh pasta?
For reference, I'm using a fairly standard recipe of one egg per 100g of 'OO' flour; and I add salt and a little olive oil to the pan when cooking, as well as following all the normal steps that give successful results with store bought pasta – Could it be that I'm not working the dough enough, working it too much, or just down to not using the "correct" type of flour (semolina flour doesn't appear to be available in my area)?
Best Answer
I have that problem when I am impatient and don't let the pasta dry out long enough before putting it on to boil.
It is important to let the pasta dry even just in loose little heaps once sliced into noodles. It doesn't have to get totally dry just dry enough that you can't squish the noodles back together into dough.
Also you need to cook fresh pasta for a very short amount of time in a LOT of water, about 1.5x as much water as you would use for dry, so that the noodles have less chance to run into each other. In fact I frequently don't boil them at all separately but just toss them in the soup I am serving them with for for a two to three minutes before serving.