“Homegrown” Pasta, A Real Food Revelation, . . . and Why Italians Aren’t as Fat as You Think They Should Be

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It’s one of the world’s great mysteries: Italians eat pasta on a daily basis. But somehow they don’t end up with the waistline and health problems that one might expect to plague an American who embraced a similar habit of daily pasta.

We’re all in the habit of dismissing pasta as an “empty carbohydrate.” A yummy treat that delivers a delicious load of carbs . . . but little of real nutritional value. We did too.

BUT

But, but, but!

The recent acquisition of a pasta machine (we have this one) led to a search for homemade pasta recipes and we realized the truth!

Here it is, broken down into three, life-changing pasta facts, for the enjoyment of our readers:

Life-changing Pasta Fact Number 1

Pasta is ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO BE an egg based food.

Now, if you go to Walmart and buy a box of Barilla (or any similar company), you’d be hard pressed to find even a “trace of eggs” lurking within the cardboard box you hold in your hand.

But look up any homemade pasta recipe and you’ll find that the basic process is to crack a bunch of eggs and add just enough flour to turn your eggs into dough.

Yes, really!

This works out to eggs making up about 1/3 of the overall weight of your pasta. It also allows us to claim pasta as a “homegrown” food even though we don’t grow wheat. A bit of a stretch, admittedly, but 1/3 of it is our own eggs!!

Are we just slow, or is the eggy-ness of real pasta news to everybody else too??

I mean, we knew “egg noodles” were a thing, but we assumed they were a variation on “normal noodles.”

Suddenly our “empty carbohydrate,” “guilty pleasure,” recipes are largely comprised of a highly nutritious food that can be produced here on our farm. Pasta contains protein, healthy fats, and all the other good things found in eggs. At least, it should.

How did we start there and end up with a box full of refined semolina flour and a bunch of unpronounceables? Time to start a campaign against public misinformation: any company not including eggs in their noodles should be required to label them “fake pasta.”

As an added bonus, in the unlikely event that you have any leftover noodles, you can feed them back to the chickens in a true act of recycling. Pasta in one end and out the other.

Life-Changing Pasta Fact Number 2

Whole-wheat pasta can be yummy.

If you’ve ever tried the whole-wheat version of a pasta you’ve bought from the store, you probably think that it tastes a lot like cardboard.

Now we can’t speak to the results you might get if you try to make pasta with a bag of whole wheat flour from the store. We have a countertop grain mill so we mill our whole-wheat flour fresh. The reasons for doing this would be material for a whole separate blog post. For now, suffice it to say that fresh-milled whole-wheat flour is a lot tastier and easier to work with.

The noodles we’ve made with our homegrown eggs and fresh-milled flour are a revolution in the meaning of the word “pasta.”

It not only is better, it tastes better too.

It’s similar to the difference in flavor and nutrition between homemade bread and Sara Lee.

Family favorites are back on the table and better than ever before!

There’s nothing like watching your children slurp down their noodles and when you know that they’re actually eating eggs.

Life-changing Pasta Fact Number 3

Pasta isn’t hard to make.

Especially if you ignore you children’s pleas for spaghetti (which can be trickier to handle) and stick to more of a “fettucine” style wide noodle, homemade pasta isn’t only delicious and nutritious, it’s pretty quick easy to make too.

Mix up your dough, let it rest for about thirty minutes (or leaver longer to ferment if you’re making sourdough), and then feed it through your pasta maker a few times and you’re ready to go!

You can get it ready in the morning and hang it on clothes hangers to dry until dinner time, or you can just let it sit for about half an hour and then put it straight into a pot and boil it.

Seriously.

Simple, nutritious, and tastier than any other pasta you’ve ever eaten.

Everybody needs to try this!

It’s something you can’t find anywhere in the world . . . except in your own kitchen.