3 Ingredient Homemade Vegan Pasta Recipe - Bigger Bolder Baking (2024)

FAQs

How do you make homemade pasta better? ›

Eggs – The key ingredient for adding richness and moisture to the dough! Olive oil – Along with the eggs, a splash of olive oil moistens the dough and helps it come together. Salt – Add it to the dough and the pasta water for the best flavor.

Shilpa explains that making fresh pasta all comes down to knowing one ratio of flour to water, specifically two parts flour to one part water by weight. For you bread heads out there, yes, that means 50% hydration, or 100 grams of flour to 50 grams of water.

Making fresh vegan pasta

Mix 3 cups of flour (or semolina) with about 1 cup of water, a pinch of salt, and 1 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil. If you want to give your pasta a nice warm color as if it contained eggs, you can add a pinch of turmeric or saffron to the flour.

The more you work that dough, the more elasticity it will develop. Striking the right level of gluten development is key to fresh pastas, pizza crusts, and most baked goods.

Flour is the single most important ingredient for making fresh pasta, so choosing the right flour can make all the difference. The three most commonly used types of flour for pasta-making are all-purpose flour, “00” flour and semola (sometimes called semolina flour in the UK).

Pasta products contain milled wheat, water, and occasionally eggs and/or optional ingredients. Pasta manufacturers typically use milled durum wheat (semolina, durum granulars, and durum flour) in pasta production, although farina and flour from common wheat are occasionally used.

To be sure that your pasta is cooked correctly, it is enough to follow a few, simple rules. To begin with, you should keep in mind the right quantities. In Italy, the golden rule for cooking pasta is 1, 10, 100 or 1 liter of water, 10 grams of salt for every 100 grams of pasta.

Most packaged pasta—including spaghetti, rotini, and any other type—is 100 percent vegan. To know for sure, simply check the ingredients on your package! Sometimes, you might see “egg” listed as an ingredient in “fresh” pastas, so avoid those—but generally, pasta contains no animal-derived ingredients.

What is the healthiest pasta for vegans? ›

Vegans can eat whole grain pasta as long as it does not include egg or other non-vegan ingredients. Whole grain pasta is also plant-based in most cases, but be sure to read the ingredients before purchasing. Whole-grain pasta has the added benefit of extra fiber and is a good addition to any vegan diet.

Fortunately, most traditional boxed pasta contains only one or two plant-based ingredients, such as semolina and enriched wheat flour. There are more creative varieties, as well; some manufacturers make pasta from rice, beans, legumes, sea kelp, and sweet potatoes, among other vegan ingredients.

Semolina flour is good for pasta because it's a hard variety of wheat and has a high protein content. Both of these properties give more structure to pasta which provides that elusive 'al dente' quality to fresh pastas.

Too much flour makes the pasta tough. Not enough will result in runny lumps that are impossible to roll through pasta maker.

Pasta dough also needs some plasticity for it to be moulded into all of those wonderful shapes. All-purpose flour does what it says on the tin, so it's perfectly fine to use for making pasta. However, most pasta recipes will recommend either semola or “00” flour.

Fresh pasta typically has a shorter shelf-life but is almost always richer and more flavorful. It is considered more tender as it takes about half the cooking time than dried pasta.

Cold-Start Pasta Is Faster and Uses Less Water

In our tests, 1 pound of dried pasta started in 1 quart of cold water cooked up just as nicely al dente as the same type of pasta started in 4 quarts of boiling water (our conventional method).