We cooked dried spinach pasta from our favorite Italian deli (Mario's Meat Market in Fort Myers) this past week. I wanted to try it fresh (hard to find.)
I read several recipes online (I think my Philips cookbook is home in Massachusetts). The recipe I liked the best used pasta "juice" and explained it as fresh spinach and just a little water, blended and pureed. In other words, the spinach was raw and fresh.
I used about a cup and a half of fresh spinach, compressed tightly in the measuring cup. And 1/3 cup of water placed in my Ninja juice maker. I ending up adding more spinach and a bit more water. I had a very deep green thick smoothie-type puree. The juice is simply a replacement for the water usually added to the egg as the liquid for the dough. This juice made three batches of pasta.
I placed 3/4 of flour and 3/4 cup of semolina with a few dashes of salt into the pasta machine bowl. My Phillips machine weighs the dry ingredients so this was about 275 grams.
I cracked one egg into the liquid measure supplied by Phillips and 1/4 tsp olive oil. I then added enough of the puree to meet the required mls of fluid (95) and started the cycle, adding the wet to the dry and waiting for it to extrude. I cut the pasta at about 10 inches as it extruded from the machine.
More spinach juice could have been added as the extrusion was a tad dry, creating little sharp ridges on the pasta that came from the very center of the fettuccini die. That said, it looks pretty much perfect!
Fresh pasta cooks in just a few minutes and is delicious!
I made roasted yellow beet pasta using the pasta machine and plan to make other flavors as it really is so easy.
