Homemade pappardelle

The easiest hand cut pappardelle strands. A standard fresh egg pasta dough is rolled into silky sheets and cut into wide strips. Homemade pappardelle is the easiest shape to make if you are new to pasta. It pairs well with absolutely any pasta sauce.

Homemade pappardelle

Hi! I am writing up this guide for the perfect homemade pappardelle! It is the easiest shape to make. All you need is a batch of my easy homemade pasta dough and you are good to go! I like to give the dough a few rolls to make it super smooth and silky and then it is cut into strands whatever size you like. Try it with any of my butter sauces or my brand new white pork ragu!

Fresh egg pasta dough

To make the pappardelle you will need a batch of my homemade pasta dough. It's a standard pastas dough made from flour and eggs. I like to use a combination of '00' or plain flour and semola. It is really all about personal preference if you use both kinds of flours here. The semola is what is known as a 'hard wheat' and will give the pasta a bit of bite to it. If you use only '00' or plain flour the pasta will be a lot softer, try out a few different ratios when you make a dough to see what you prefer.

A note on weighing the eggs

As you will see in my pasta dough recipe, I weigh the eggs. The typical recipe is 1 x egg for every 100g of flour. This will work most of the time but eggs vary in weight so much so I like to weigh them to get a perfect ratio. It is a 57% hydration dough which sounds complicated but it just means the eggs are 57% of the dry ingredients. So for 400g flour the eggs need to be 57% of that which is 228g. If you want to make a bigger batch of dough it is easy to work out eg: 600g flour you will need 342g eggs. I have a bowl sitting on my scales and crack the eggs in one by one until I get to 228g. Sometimes you'll need to crack the last one into a cup, give it a mix and dribble it in until you get the right weight.

How to cut the pappardelle

Pappardelle is hand cut and there is no right or wrong way to do it! You might think that rolling out really long pasta sheets and cutting into equally long strands is the way to go but I prefer much shorter lengths. Having really long stands of pasta in my opinion is a pain to cook and serve so I keep them shorter.

• Roll out a pasta sheet and try to get it as wide as the roller so you get nice even wide sheets.
• Cut into 25 - 28cm lengths and sprinkle evenly with course semolina.

• Fold each end in to meet in the middle

• Cut into whatever widths you like, there is no rule! You could do 2cm or even 3cm or 4cm.
• Unfold them and lay them on top of each other, there will be a good layer of semolina on the underside of each one to stop them sticking.
• Lay them out on a tray flat or you can wrap them round your hand in a nest.

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