Today I made my first attempt at making fresh pasta from scratch. No, that’s not true. It’s technically my second attempt, as attempt #1 on Saturday was a miserable failure, resulting in a crumbly, dry mess instead of dough. That went in the garbage. But today was a different story.

I learned from my previous mistakes and beginning with only eggs, flour, and a little salt, I created a pasta dough ball:

Then Michelle and I ran it through our new KitchenAid mixer (a Christmas present I gave her) using the pasta roller and cutter attachments and ended up with this:

While Michelle’s arms and hands worked well for temporarily holding the pasta out of the machine tonight, I think we’ll have to get a pasta drying rack soon.

After cooking the fresh pasta and combining it with butter, parmesan cheese, and more salt, we ended up with traditional fettucini alfredo:

Unfortunately, the pasta was bland. The sauce was okay but the whole dish needed far more salt, especially in the dough. A lot of the pasta also stuck together, so we’ll use more flour next time. And it was too thick, so we’ll go with thickness setting 5 on the machine instead of stopping at 4. But despite all these problems, it was a fun hour or so in the kitchen and I’ll definitely give it another shot soon. I think it went pretty well for the first (official) time I’ve ever made fresh pasta from scratch.