How to Make Egg Noodles

First, you’re going to need two cups of flour and three eggs. Semolina flour is better; if the flour you use is too coarse, your pasta dough will be noticeably textured, and not a in a good way; there will be shame in every bite. So use a fine-ground flour. The eggs should be duck eggs, because those are better, but if you must use chicken eggs, use the largest ones you have access to. Ideally sold to you by a bearded and suspendered man in a straw hat at the farmers’ market who you don’t want to assume is Amish, but there it is.

Now, ask yourself, why do you think it’s a good idea to make your own egg noodles? You are engaging in a fundamentally unnecessary labor. We’ve solved noodles as a society: noodles are the personification of instant gratification, just add water. But here you are, buying flour and eggs. Why?

You’re going to want to dump the flour onto your work surface so that it makes a mountain—did I mention you, your clothes, your kitchen are all going to get covered in flour by the time we’re done?—and mold it into a volcano shape. Insofar as fine loose flour can be molded. Then crack the eggs into the open caldera and whisk them together with a small whisk, or a fork, or your fingers. Gradually combine the eggy mixture with the caldera walls around it so that you aren’t overwhelming it with new flour until the old flour has been incorporated.

So are you doing this for status? To show that, for you, making food from scratch and going to the farmers’ market aren’t just things people in your Instagram feed do; but things that you do, really, in real life (and then post on Instagram)? It can’t be worth it. There has to be an easier, more photogenic way to outflank your college acquaintances and former coworkers—one that doesn’t get flour on the lens of your phone camera.

You should now have a tacky ball of dough where your volcano once was. If your dough is very sticky, add a little flour. If your dough is dry, that’s a little more complicated. I did instruct you to use duck eggs. But here we are. If it’s a little too dry, try some olive oil. If it’s much too dry, punch another caldera in it, crack another egg—a small one this time if possible—and repeat that whole egg-combining process we've already discussed.

Maybe you’re trying to take a stand against the whole capitalist consumerist circus? You’re like, “I won’t buy those soulless corporately-packaged noodles anymore, no sir, I’m going to make my own from scratch.” Well, that’s commendable. You did probably buy the flour from some fiefdom of the Amazon kingdom, though. Even if you didn’t, think of all the other things you’re buying, things you couldn’t live without—dishwasher detergent and t-shirts and toothpaste—you haven’t exactly opted out of capitalism, have you? Sure, small victories are still victories. But are you really making your own noodles, going to all this trouble, just to score an incremental triumph against our capitalist overlords?

Ok, now you should definitely have a tacky ball of dough. Time to knead. If you’ve never kneaded anything before, you’re basically trying to squish and poke and hug the dough until it becomes smooth and uniform. Dust your hands and work surface with flour first; it starts out a little sticky. You’ll know you’ve arrived when the dough starts to look like its own guy. (It’ll make sense when you see it.) Now wrap that guy up in plastic and throw him in the fridge. (To make things easier later, you should actually divide the dough into two or more clumps and wrap them separately.) Now you wait.

While you’re waiting, maybe we can get to the bottom of why on earth you’re doing this. Maybe you just like good food. It’s a fact that homemade noodles are better than instant. But it’s also a fact that the noodles they make in a good restaurant are going to be better than yours, at least for the first umpteen attempts. If you like good food, you should dine out. Maybe you like good food and you’re on a budget? Totally fair! So if you had more money, you’d stop doing silly things like making your own noodles, right? Or have we still not found your true motivation?

Once the dough has rested in the fridge for at least half an hour, you can move on to the next step. Take one of the dough balls and roll it into a flat oval shape.

Now, I’m going to assume that you have a hand-cranked pasta mill. If you have some other sort of contraption, like one of those stand mixer pasta attachments, I’m sure you can figure it out. If you’re planning to do it completely with a rolling pin and a knife, heaven help you because I cannot.

Anyway, feed your oblong dough clump into the pasta mill while cranking it. (Now is a good time to spontaneously have a friend helping you.) You’ll want to configure the mill to make the dough just a little thinner than it already is. If everything works out happily, you will now have a flatter oblong dough clump. Fold it “like an envelope.” Then run it through the pasta mill again, this time on a slightly thinner setting that you used the first time. Repeat everything in this paragraph until your dough is “penny-thick.”

You surely aren’t doing this as career training, right? You know that professional cooking isn’t nearly as fun and leisurely as home cooking, don’t you? You’ve read the statistic that 976 out of 15 restaurants fail in the first six months, haven’t you? Why, oh, why would you be doing this as a career? If this is your reason, it raises more questions than it solves.

Now, take your penny-thick rectangle of pasta dough and run it through the pasta mill again, this time through the teeth that will cut it into your desired noodle thickness. Dust the noodles aggressively with flour as they come out—otherwise, the noodles will canoodle with each other and join back into a single mass the moment you stop chaperoning them.

Stop and congratulate yourself: you have raw pasta. Boil in salted water until al dente, anoint with sauce, and enjoy.

So why go to all this trouble? Maybe you love the idea of making your kitchen a powdery mess, of making your friend hold up her end of the pasta dough, of making something with your own two hands imperfect and antiquated though the result may be. Maybe, when it comes down to it, you don’t think of pasta-making as a wasted afternoon; it’s all those other things—the things we collectively call “productivity”—that waste your afternoons. Maybe life is a little messy and a little slow and a little inconvenient and a little cooperatives, and maybe you like it that way.

That would be a very good reason.