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This is a recipe for a very simple, all purpose pasta dough. The resulting pasta is easy to cook, typically only taking a few seconds in the water, unlike dried pasta that can take 10 minutes or more. It has just the right mouth feel, perfectly al dente. It only takes about 30 minutes to prepare the dough, and most of that time is spent resting the dough.

Currently, I have no pasta maker, no machine to help me shape noodles. That is OK! They aren’t necessary. I cannot make macaroni or ziti, or other tubular pastas yet, but there are many shapes of pasta that you can make with only your hands, or a knife, or cookie cutters. Without a pasta machine, the pasta is usually a bit rustic looking, but that only adds charm to the dish. I will provide you with instructions on how to cut and form various pasta/noodle shapes.

As I have already said, this recipe is simple, but it can be jazzed up in countless ways. Add a splash of white wine, or some cooked spinach, or tomatoes. You can even play around with the flour. For this basic pasta, a half and half mix of Semolina flour and white all-purpose flour creates what, to me is, a perfect texture. But there are times when I want a slightly softer pasta. For instance when I make ravioli or tortellini, I think that a softer noodle works best and I, therefor, substitute a second cup of all-purpose flour for the Semolina. You can also try using whole wheat flour. Making your own pasta is really a lot of fun and will allow you to be very creative with your cooking. In future recipes I will provide details on some of these and other mods, so keep an eye out for those if you want to try them and think you need more directions.

This recipe will yield enough dough for approximately six to eight servings of pasta. This serving estimation may vary greatly depending on the kind of pasta you are making.

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I make bread (a triple batch) around once every month or two. I usually make whole wheat bread, but sometimes I make white bread as a treat, or because I intend to use it for a specific recipe. White bread can be very simple. A fantastic pan loaf can be made with simply flour, water, and yeast. Since I do not make it often,  however, when I do make it, I like to make more than just basic white bread. This is still a simple bread recipe. It is just a bit enhanced to create an amazing tasting, soft, and fluffy loaf of bread. Store bought white bread, that tastes like air and smells like pretty much nothing, is no comparison. This bread can be used for anything you would typically use store bought white bread for. Even fussy bread eaters who only want wonder bread will likely love it. It is simply scrumptious!

The recipe for the dough for this bread can be found here. Please follow that entire recipe, and once the dough has risen, as it did at the end of that recipe, you can come back here and use this guide to finish the job. If you made the full triple batch of dough, then you can make as many as three of these loaves, but if you made only a third of that recipe, or if you are doing something else with the rest of the dough you will obviously only make one loaf. It is totally up to you. Today I am making two pan loaves and a tray of “bread muffins”, basically just little rolls cooked in a muffin tray.

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I use this soft white bread dough to make many items. This includes sandwich loaves, rolls and buns of all shapes and sizes, garlic knots, pizza, braided loaves, baguettes, and whatever else takes my fancy, really. Since they all require the exact same dough, I thought I would post the recipe for the dough here, and avoid the redundancy of repeating the entire process each time I want to post a recipe for another item that the dough is used to make. Most of the time, the nuances that make each recipe different takes place once the steps in this guide are complete, so I will simply link you to this recipe and then explain how to finish it in the new article. I will also list on the bottom of this article, all of the recipes that I have posted, that require this dough to be made.

This recipe is for a triple batch of dough. So if you wanted to only make sandwich loafs, this recipe will yield three loaves. What I typically do is make one or two sandwich loaves, and use the other third of the batch to make something else. For example I might make small rolls (Which my husband calls “bread apples”, and eats them by the fist full), or a braided loaf, a pizza, or hamburger buns, etcetera. Pretty much every, and maybe actually every, recipe that I use this bread for requires either a third, two thirds, or the whole triple batch. This makes it easy to make multiple things with just one batch of dough. The dough can also be formed and frozen and then thawed and baked at times, though this works better for some recipes than for others. It may seem like a lot to make at once, but if you are a bread eater, and prefer to make your own bread most, or all of the time, making one loaf or small batch of smaller breads all the time is just a lot of unnecessary work. If you think that this is just too much to make at once you are totally free to do the maths and just use a third of each ingredient amount I call for here. It will work perfectly if you follow the instructions with the reduced amount of dough.