Directions: |
Directions:You may be wondering why you would go making your own low fat pasta, when you can buy it prepacked, and ready to cook?
Well, one reason is that by making your own, you eat fresh pasta. There is a difference of taste and texture between fresh pasta and prepacked pasta.
But there is another reason: if you make your own pasta, you may want to use nutritius ingredients, ensuring that your pasta not only tastes good, but is also good for you.
For instance, you may want to make your own low fat pasta with unrefined flour, ensuring that your pasta is rich in fibre and B complex Vitamins.
Besides, learning to make your own basic pasta dough is the first skill towards preparing other (more advanced?) types of pasta dishes such as lasagna, raviolli, tortellini and that type of thing.
And it's not such a difficult thing to do. It's even fun!
You see, normally you make pasta with refined wheat flour, eggs and salt.
But if you want low fat pasta, you need to use water instead of eggs, and you have to give salt a miss.
This low fat pasta recipe makes about about 1.5 pounds of pasta, and it takes about 50 minutes to prepare.
This is what you need, to make your own low fat basic pasta: First, put the flour in a large mixing bowl and make a well in the middle (like a volcano, sort of thing).
Then, pour in the water, and mix with a knife till the dough binds.
After that, you start mixing with your hands and knead it till all the flour is evenly incorporated into the dough.
Move the dough to a kitchen bench, and knead it for about 10 minutes, till the it becomes smooth and elastic.
Next, put the dough into a zip-lock plastic bag and leave it there for about 30 minutes.
Then, take a quarter of the dough and roll it out by hand on a slightly floured surface. Roll it very thin, and leave it to rest and dry before using it.
Freeze whatever you don't use. It will remain good for up to 3 months.
How to Make Your Own Low Fat Lasagna Pasta
Lasagna comes in large strips of pasta. You can buy it in different varieties already prepacked.
But making your own low fat lasagna pasta is not very difficult.
First, you make the basic dough above
Next, roll out a quarter of the dough into a large and thin square.Cut the edges to make it square. ;-)
Then, cut the square into rectangles of equal size 4 x 3 inches
That's it! You can store your low fat lasagna pasta in the fridge and have it ready for whenever you want to cook a delicious low fat lasagna recipe. |