Right when quarantine started, I had just moved to Phoenix and legitimately needed…well, everything. Naturally, this required a trip to Costco.
I was also binge watching a bunch of doomsday prep videos on YouTube at the time and flour was on everyone’s prepper list. I was determined to find some for my pantry, not even knowing how to use it outside of my go-to banana pancake recipe (my dad was the baker in the family, not me). Lo and behold, this Costco was stocked with sacks of 25 pound flour. I grabbed one and rushed to the finish line before other panic buyers got their greedy little hands on this hot commodity.
Again, I never really baked or cooked with flour seriously before, but my dad was a total pro. He treated baking like compounding lol, such a classic pharmacy nerd. So I texted my mom for his bread recipes and I’m just gonna drop the screenshot from that exchange here:
Another thing that seemed to be on every prepper’s list was pasta. And at the height of panic buying, the pasta aisle was completely wiped. But what I did have was the genesis to pasta— all 25 pounds of it. So again, I turned to my trusted source of non evidence-based information (YouTube) and found Bigger, Bolder, Baking’s recipe for vegan pasta. This recipe was my gateway drug into legit cooking. No more cardboard pizza recipes here, y’all.
Ingredients
3 cups AP flour
2 tbsp olive oil
3/4 cup of water (may need a splash more)
Instructions
1. Make volcano with AP flour
2. Mix olive oil and water and incorporate into the AP flour volcano lol
3. Slowly mix it all together until you start to form a ball of dough. If needed, add a splash more water.
4. Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest in fridge for 30 min or more.
5. Take out of fridge and cut the dough into four equal pieces.
6. Cover dough you are not currently flattening with a damp towel.
7. **MANUAL LABOR!!** Roll out one piece of dough into a thin sheet with a rolling pin, then roll it back up itself like you would a sleeping bag lol.
8. Slice your log of dough into desired width of pasta (I like to cut it to about 1 cm). Unravel and lay out the pasta to dry on a drying rack.
9. Repeat above until you have all four of your dough balls cut up into pasta!
10. Cooking the pasta: boil pasta in water seasoned with lots of salt for 4-5 minutes for the most al dente pasta ever. Yay!
You can store homemade pasta in the freezer once nice and dry. Form little nests and place them in Ziploc baggies as single servings. Take them out whenever you want and boil them for 4-5 minutes. Should be good for at least a month! I have a bunch pre-made, and they’re all just hanging out in my freezer— much better than boxed pasta. My favorite dish to make with this is aglio e olio, which I will cover in another post.
Until the next post, stay safe!
-Mimi 🙂
