Make Your Own Pasta – Gluten-Free, Egg-Free, Dairy-Free, Vegan

Kitchen gadgets are toys for adults and yes, fun to play with. I have wanted to make my own gluten-free pasta for some time now, but without the right tools it was difficult. Enter the new toy I received for Christmas – a Kitchen Aid Pasta attachment.

My Kitchen Aid stand mixer is the workhorse in my kitchen, getting near-daily use, so it’s hard to believe that I have never used an attachment – I have never even removed the little knob where the attachments go – until now:

The pasta attachment comes with presses for many different shapes and sizes of pasta. I started with rigatoni.

I had to create my own recipe for pasta dough because every gluten-free recipe I could find still used eggs. That wasn’t a problem, but I did make a mistake for the first round of pasta – I made pasta dough that was similar in consistency to bread dough and (as I soon discovered) it was too wet:

Yes, that would have been perfect for bread, but too wet for pasta. I formed it into balls, and started feeding it into my machine, and nothing was coming out – for a very long time. I took the attachment off and reattached it multiple times, certain that this was a user error. One problem with too-wet dough is that it doesn’t slice well and the pieces stick together. But the bigger problem is that the dough doesn’t funnel properly through the feeder – it goes up into the attachment instead of down. On this first batch I wasted about half of my dough, which I discovered as I was cleaning the machine. (And yes – it made the attachment much harder to clean.)

About a half dozen Google searches and YouTube videos later, I knew I needed to use less liquid in my pasta dough and I was ready for round two. This time I made spirals.

The right consistency for the dough is very crumbly:

When forming small balls, I had to really mold them together:

And it worked! When I used a low speed I got straighter spirals:

A faster speed yielded curlier spirals:

Fun, right? I found that the noodles cook best when the pasta sits for an hour or more before cooking – this allows them to dry a bit and hold their shape better.

I’ll be experimenting with more pasta dough, but here’s a basic recipe for you to start with:

Millet/Rice Pasta

¼ cup arrowroot starch (32 grams)
¾ cup brown rice flour (90 grams)
½ cup millet flour (60 grams)
½ tsp xanthan gum
¼ tsp salt
2 tbsp light olive oil
½ cup flax seed gel
4 tbsp warm water

Combine the dry ingredients and set them aside. In the stand mixer, combine all of the wet ingredients. Add the dry ingredients slowly until a crumbly mixture forms. Form acorn-sized balls and feed them through the Kitchen Aid pasta attachment.

Keep in mind that fresh pasta cooks very quickly – in as little as two minutes!

What kind of pasta dough should I make next?