For The Best Homemade Pasta, You Only Need To Remember One Ratio

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For a simple food, pasta can be surprisingly complicated. Knowing how much salt to use in your pasta water, for instance, is a mystery that not everybody can wrap their brain around. Making your own pasta might seem unbearably arcane to a novice, but, luckily, it's not as hard as you're probably hyping it up to be. The secret to great homemade pasta isn't experience, fancy tools, or prayers beseeching the ancient Roman gods to shower you in good luck. The key is a decent food scale — we see good reviews on this economical model by Soyok, available on Amazon — and keeping the ratio of 1:100 in mind.

Italian cooks doing things the way Nonnas have done them for centuries swear by a formula of one large egg to every 100 grams of "double zero" or Tipo 00 flour. Yes, it has to be that specific flour. Luckily, that's also readily available on Amazon from the Italian brand Polselli. Just weigh your flour and add one whole egg for every 100 grams. With an appropriate amount of kneading, this ratio of flour to the fat and moisture provided by the egg(s) should be sufficient to result in a pliable, satiny dough that creates beautiful pasta in any shape you'd like. Just make a well in your flour with your hand or the back of a spoon, drop the egg(s) in there, and mix away. Does this sound just too simple to be factual? Well ... it might be. While countless pasta enthusiasts swear by the golden flour-to-egg ratio, others insist that the matter is more complicated. What gives?

Thomas Keller, a celebrity chef who certainly knows his food, loads his pasta dough with egg yolks. Likewise, alternative sources will argue that "one egg" isn't exact enough for the chemistry behind good pasta, and also point out that eggs can vary drastically in size. We've also seen it bandied about that the 1:100 ratio doesn't scale well beyond one or two servings. Far be it for us to argue with a formula that has worked for tons of people for generations, but, for the fastidious among us, you could also weigh your eggs. We've seen 185 grams of shelled eggs to 300 grams of Tipo 00 pasta as one possible ratio, which is usually achieved with three whole eggs and one yolk, but can be supplemented with olive oil.

There's only one way that you, personally, can identify your own successful ratio for making pasta, and that's to get in the kitchen and experiment! Luckily, it's hard to mess up pasta to the point that it's not tasty, even if your results aren't especially pretty. Trial and error is an excellent teacher, after all. While you're cooking up all those batches of experimental pasta, save your pasta water and make homemade bread ... it's what all those centuries of Nonnas would want you to do!