FAQs

However you like really! Scroll around, search on keywords, or check out the recipe categories in the sidebar. If you're more visually-brained, a great place to start is The Pasta Drawer. This is an interactive pasta map that you can use to navigate our pasta and sauce recipes. To get the most out of it all we recommend reading the information surrounding each recipe, seeing what we're up to on social media (we often post little tips and tricks), and leaving comments or sending us a message. We always love to chat pasta!

Yep. We have a pasta dinner every Sunday, and sometimes a pasta lunch through the week too. Often we’ll make the pasta the afternoon before we eat it to give it some time to dry out and firm up in the fridge.

Yes, thanks for asking. This is a blog mostly about pasta, but also all that goes with it (et al) – recipes, family stories, and techniques for handling dough and cooking things. The pasta and the blog is handled by myself, Al, my little toddler, another Al, and my youngest, also Al (at least by middle name). So, Pasta et Al.

Once upon a time they were. We only made a few types of pasta back in the day, but the varieties of doughs and pasta that we make now all originate from the processes and concepts that she taught me. They’ve come from decades of tinkering and experimentation, and while they’ll always be works in progress, they do yield consistently delicious results. So you can follow along knowing that they’ve grown from a seed she planted many years ago. I think that she’d approve of them all.

No! You’re just mixing wet and dry stuff until it holds together and doesn’t stick to things. We provide in-depth recipes with all kinds of ratios and handling tips, but it’s as much a record of what we did that particular Sunday, as an actual guide as to how you should do it. Absolutely follow the recipe if you’d like, but also don’t be afraid to go your own way with it. We believe that the important things to keep in mind are balancing the wet with the dry, kneading the dough for long enough, and letting it rest well before turning it into pasta. If you’re not already confident enough to balance your ingredients by touch, follow us for a few weeks and you will be!

Of course, particularly for pastas and their paired sauces. I include notes on substitutions that you may like to try, but do experiment for yourself. You’ll quickly discover combinations that don’t work so well… For dough, I’d recommend at least keeping the divide between extruded and hand rolled pasta recipes. Some flour combinations and water ratios are aimed specifically at making the dough hardy enough for heavy handling (eg. orecchiette), or extrusion (eg. spaghetti).

Big question; general answer, yes, but with caveats. If you have only all-purpose flour, use it! If you don’t have enough eggs for our egg-heavy recipes, swap for a dough with less eggs. But remember that you’ll run into difficulties trying to extrude silky hand-rolled doughs, and vice versa. Shaped pasta also benefits from hardier dough. But you can always make good old flat, hand-cut pasta! The longer answer to the flour question deserves a blog post of its own. Watch this space! In the meantime, I often ramble about gluten and flour over on Instagram.

Everyone salts differently. Some people salt the pasta, some don’t. Some salt the water, some don’t. I used to think of it as a flavour thing (which it is in part), but more than that, salt actually strengthens the gluten bonds. I might have mentioned that I love firm, thick dough, and so I almost always add salt. Structurally, it is useful to help delicate doughs that you’re working more or handling rougher, but your choice of flour is perhaps a more important variable in this respect. As far as salting the water goes, I do it for taste. You’d need a whole heap of salt to significantly raise the boiling temperature, so if your concern is with losing the boil when you add cold pasta to the water, just boil more water to begin with.

It could be anything from the relative size of the eggs we’re using, to the weather on the day you’re making your dough. There are some things that our recipes can’t account for – if you’re not confident, stick to the recipe but don’t add all of the flour at once. And if it’s too wet, gradually add more flour, one big pinch at a time until it no longer sticks to your fingers or the kneading surface. If all else fails, get in touch and we’ll troubleshoot together.

These days we make and eat our pasta within a week, keeping it in the fridge, or freezing it straight away. Filled pasta is generally best stored in the fridge for up to a day. If you really want to, you can freeze things like our spinach and ricotta ravioli, but it will make the ricotta granular in texture when you eventually cook it. For unfilled pasta, it’ll keep in the fridge for up to a week. There are many ways to truly dry it out and keep it out of the fridge but, in short, it’s hard to get factory-like results (and I mean that in a positive, bite experience kind of way) without a dehydrator. I rarely use one myself, and instead just put my pasta on trays uncovered in the fridge for 1-3 days. Instead of focusing on storage and shelf-life, use refrigeration as a means of improving the pasta’s mouthfeel. Even overnight you’ll see an improvement.