How to make pasta without a machine: "It's fun and you can't really go wrong"

For the uninitiated, making pasta from scratch may seem more difficult than it's worth. After all, why spend your hard-earned cash on a big, expensive, hyper-specialized pasta maker when you can pick up a package of dry spaghetti from the supermarket for $2?

And For those looking to have a blast, the internet is full of intimidating videos of masterful Italian cooks sculpting eggs, flour and water into wondrous shapes, with skill and dexterity passed down from generation to generation. But while the barriers to entry may seem insurmountable, they don't have to be. Early pasta makers did not have a Marcato.

<1 p class="dcr -8zipgp">"You can do it so simply," says Ellie Bouhadana, head chef at Melbourne's Hope Street Radio. "It's just flour, water and a wooden bench."

Before the pandemic, Bouhadana worked in an Italian kitchen and organized pop- citywide pasta ups; during the lockdown, she started a popular pasta delivery business. Despite its culinary successes, there is a caveat. “I wouldn't call myself a pasta expert at all. I do it because it's fun and I've learned how I like to do it.

"I would never call it traditional."

Hope Street Radio co-owner Pete Baxter says the extra time it takes to make pasta at home is worth it: "You'll never get the same kind of sauce with store-bought pasta. …Plus, the texture is really fluffy and unique."

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For some entry-level courses, Bouhadana chose three machine-free pasta shapes of increasing complexity: pici, a long pasta, followed by cavatelli and orecchiette. Some liberties have been taken to streamline the steps for beginners - for example, using on...