Video:How to Make Colored Pasta

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Transcript:How to Make Colored Pasta

Hi. I’m Erica Wides from Chef Smartypants.com, here for About.com. Today I want to show you how to make different colored and flavored pasta dough.

Natural Ways to Color Pasta

So, I’m going to start out by just making a plain pasta dough and then I’ll make a spinach dough and then a saffron dough and for the third piece of pasta. I’m going to make black pasta that gets colored with squid ink.You can flavor and color pasts dough with a lot of different things. Different herbs, different vegetable purees, you can have a lot of fun with it.

Colored Pasta Ingredients

• 2 cups of all purpose flour
• one and a half cups of milk
• a teaspoon of salt
• a tablespoon of sugar

Make the Pasta Dough

And into the flour I’m going to add some salt and mix the flour into the salt first, so that it gets really well distributed. Then, I’m going to crack in two eggs and then using a fork I’m going to start beating the eggs in the center and before that egg is completely incorporated I also want to add a tablespoon of olive oil. And I’m also going to add just a little bit of water, maybe two or three tablespoons at the most. And then I get in there with my hands and keep working in a circle until the whole thing really comes together and at this point I’m going to take it out of the bowl and transfer it to my board and I’ll start kneading it on the board. I just want to put a little flour down. You want to use the heels of your hand and it’s a sort of turning, folding and pressing. I’m going to divide it up into three parts.

Green Spinach Pasta

Now, this is spinach that has been cooked, cooled and then squeezed dry. I think frozen spinach works really well or this and I’m going to just add some of the Spinach right on the board kinto my pasta dough. And, I’ll just start kneading my spinach into my dough. So, I’m using that same kneading motion to incorporate my spinach.

Orange Saffron Pasta

And, now, I’ll do the yellow dough and I’m using powdered Saffron. Just a pinch of that powdered Saffron and this one incorporate. I think I’m going to add a little more of that powdered saffron.

Black Squid Ink Pasta

And now the last one will be our squid ink pasta. So, we’re going to add some of this to the dough and just knead it in. About a tablespoon and then I’ll start kneading. So, I’m going to try and incapsulate it into my dough. Like that. And you can see, it’s pretty dark stuff.

Shape the Pasta

Now, this is a pasta roller attachment for a stand mixer. We always want to start out with the roller on the widest setting. You don’t want to put too much dough through the machine at once. Even with the rollers at the widest setting you still have to pre-flatten that dough. I’m going to fold this in thirds, like a letter. And put it back through the machine with the open end going through. And now, it’s going to finish kneading my dough and make it much smoother. And we do this three times. Put a little flour on there. And, in we go. So, now I can change the setting on my machine and start rolling thinner.So that’s two I’ll go to three, I’ll go to four. And how thin you make it all depends on what you’re going to use it for. So, now we’ll do the same thing with the spinach pasta. So, now I’ve changed the attachment on the machine to a cutter blade and I’m using the fettucini blade.

Cooking Fresh Pasta

Now fresh pasta cooks really quickly. It’s about a minute in boiling salted water. You want to make sure that you use enough water so that your pasta has room to swim and this is ready to come out.

Thanks for watching. To learn more, find us on the web at about.com.