My pasta filled weekend (as hinted at on friday)

Since I've got a shiny red enamel and chrome pasta maker which has remained untested (due to my own fear of failure, I'll admit), I decided that this lovely long-weekend was the time to get some tipo "00" on my clothes.

I used Jamie Oliver's recipe for Basic Egg Pasta because it, well, says it's basic in the name. The recipes calls for:
600g tipo "00" flour (which my pathetic local supermarket had in stock)
6 large free-range eggs or 12 egg yolks.

Convinced of my failure I used six whole eggs since I would have felt too guilty wasting twelve eggs. The key to the recipe is the amount of time you "rest" the dough in the fridge, the longer you let it rest, the easier it is to feed through the machine. One more thing, don't despair if the dough crumbles when you first feed it through the machine, try breaking it into two smaller sections, feed each through the machine individually (it doesn't matter if they break), then place on top of each other and feed through again.

My ball of dough, not quite silky-smooth like Jamie says it should be,
but I put it in the fridge and it worked fine.

The point at which I realised I should probably cut the sheet in half.

My first tagliatelle, and a rather crusty, dough-mixing hand.

The finished product! It was delicious,
next week I'll blog some recipes for tagliatelle (I sort-off promise).