Imperia MilleGnochi

Earlier this month it snowed and I really wanted to make homemade pasta, so I used my Imperia pasta machine that my grandmother gave us for a wedding gift, and the Imperia MilleGnochi attachment that was another wedding gift. We've been married 6.5 years and this was my first time using either of these! This attachment makes three pasta shapes - Gnocchetti Sardi, Cavatelli and Rigatelli.

I searched online for info on this attachment and unfortunately could not find much. I used Anna 00 flour for the pasta. I made this on my new dough board that I recently purchased. It was on sale for $90 when I bought it but has gone up in price since then. This board is great and I've used it for bread dough, cookie cut outs, and pasta so far. I clipped my pasta machine to it because I didn't want to attach it to my table. It worked well but when I went to take it off afterwards, I noticed that there were black marks on the wood from where the feet of the pasta machine were. I was able to rub some of it off but not all of it, so next time I will have to be more careful of that.

This pasta was pretty easy to make. I started to mix the dough in my KitchenAid mixer with the dough hook, but it wasn't mixing well so I ended up mixing it on my dough board with my hands. The dough recipe was very vague and did not provide an amount of water that should be added, or how much salt. I ended up leaving the salt out and just added small amounts of water at a time until the dough looked right.

Once the dough was ready it took me about an hour to make the pasta. The hardest part was rolling the dough into "breadsticks" by hand, as it just did not roll well for me. Next time I may try rolling out the dough with a rolling pin and cutting it into strips instead and see if that works better. I ended up with about 1 pound 9 ounces of pasta. It was about 6 cups worth. I cooked half of it for dinner with bolognese sauce that was in my freezer and froze the other half in a ziploc bag to enjoy another night. It took a bit longer to cook than I anticipated (I'm used to cooking homemade spaghetti which only takes a few minutes to cook), but the pasta was delicious! I've only made spaghetti on my own once, but this was my first time making pasta on my own and I was very pleased with the results.

Pasta Dough for Imperia MilleGnochi Attachment 

1/2 kg (500 grams) flour

3 eggs

Water

Salt

 

Mix all ingredients. If the dough is too hard, add a little more water. Knead until smooth.

 

Form into a ball and place dough in a plastic bag or a covered bowl to rest for 30 minutes or more. Knead again. Dough should not be hard.

 

When the dough is ready, cut off small sections and form into long cylindrical shapes (like breadsticks). Make sure to keep the unused portion of the dough covered at all times so it does not dry out. Sprinkle the "breadsticks" well with flour and place into the appropriate hole of the MilleGnochi attachment. Turn the crank and the pasta will start to fall out of the attachment (place a bowl there to catch it!)

 

After forming the pasta, spread it out and flour it a little bit to prevent the pieces from sticking, then dry the pasta. Once it is dry, put it into zip lock bags to freeze until needed. They freeze very well.