Last Updated on 31st January 2023 by
Have you ever tried to make your own pasta dough at home from scratch? It may not be the easiest thing, and you might be tempted to just buy pasta from the store after you try to make pasta on your own, but there are definitely some benefits.
You can make pasta out of any number of foods, and one of the most surprising for many people is spinach. Spinach pasta recipe dough is surprisingly tasty and very good for you. By making this yourself, you can get dough from unconventional foods and make your pasta more nutritious.
Spinach has all sorts of health benefits, even when you puree it like we will for this recipe. It is a great source of vitamins A, C, and K, and it is rich in folate, magnesium, and iron. In other words, using a homemade pasta dough recipe spinach instead of regular dough makes for a healthier meal.
The spinach has a mild taste to it when pureed and prepared as a pasta, so don’t worry about it drastically altering how your pasta is flavoured. Once you cover it up with sauces and seasonings, you will hardly notice the spinach flavour any longer. The pasta is going to have a slightly green tint to it as well, so it will look different. You may want to mix up homemade spinach noodles with regular pasta noodles to make a flavourful, colourful pasta medley.
Spinach Fettucine Pasta Dough Recipe
For someone who has never made homemade pasta at all, this may sound like an intimidating dish to try. However, it requires only a few ingredients, keeping things simple, so it may not be as tough and as complicated as you are expecting. Let’s look at how you can create your own pasta from ingredients in your kitchen.
Spinach Fettucine Pasta Dough Recipe
Ingredients
- 5 Eggs
- 10 ounces of frozen spinach
- 4 cups of flour, with extra flour on hand if necessary
- 1 tsp of salt
Instructions
- Start by letting the frozen spinach thaw out and then chop it finely.
- Then, squeeze the excess water from the chopped spinach. You can make this easier by putting the spinach into a fine mesh colander and pressing down with your hands or a wooden utensil.
- Combine eggs and spinach in a food processor or a blender. Set the appliance to puree and continue mixing until the mixture turns smooth and dark green. There should be no chunks of spinach visible.
- Combine salt and flour in a bowl, and you can use a fork to mix them.
- Take your flour mixture and place it on a countertop into a mound shape. Form a well in the center.
- Take the spinach and egg mixture and pour that into the well. Then stir that mixture around, adding in more and more flour for the mound as you mix.
- Your mixture will start to thicken and get chunky, and that is when you want to knead it. Add in more flour from the mound to make the dough stiff. Keep kneading for around five minutes, and keep on adding flour to make the dough sooth but not to let it get gooey and sticky.
- Let the dough rest for about 20 minutes. You should cover it with a towel or plastic wrap.
- It’s time to use the pasta maker for our spinach pasta dough recipe. Put the pasta maker together and then cut up your dough into 4-6 sections of equal size. Cover the pieces you are not using at the moment with a towel or with plastic wrap.
- Taking a single piece of dough at a time, shape your dough piece into a flat rectangle.
- Once you have your rectangle, feed it into the pasta maker. Start with the wider side of the rectangle and work to the skinnier side.
- From there, fold the pasta into thirds, kind of how you would fold a letter to fit into an envelope.
- Feed the past through the rollers a second time, and then keep doing that to get the past down to linguine sized noodles.
You can use this spinach pasta dough recipe for Cuisinart pasta maker or for any kind of standard pasta maker.
Cooking Tips
You can use frozen spinach like this recipe asks for or you can use fresh spinach. Its’s up to you, and if you are going to use fresh greens, be sure to cook them before turning the spinach into a puree. You can cook about a pound of fresh spinach for 30 seconds on a medium heat and then put it into ice to keep it from cooking too much. Then follow the instructions for getting out the liquid as the recipe detailed.
If you are making an eggless spinach pasta dough recipe, you may find that the dough is kind of crumbly. It may not hold together very well, so be prepared to roll it thicker than you really want to. It may be necessary to leave the dough a little thick to keep it from crumbling apart.
To cook your homemade pasta dough recipe spinach noodles you will want to boil some water first. You need enough water to cover the noodles. Cook in salted water at a boiling heat for about three minutes. You can cook longer for al dente pasta.
Cook the finished pasta in boiling, salted water, for about 3 minutes, or until al dente. If you cook too much at once and overcrowd your pot, the noodles won’t cook very well. If you find that the noodles are sticking together, you can add a little oil to the pot and stir that around. Pasta noodles should be stirred occasionally while cooking to prevent them from sticking together.
Can You Make Your Spinach Pasta Dough Whole Wheat?
For those who like the healthiness of a homemade pasta dough recipe spinach, but who are also looking or ways to make the dough even m healthier, whole wheat might be a good choice. Yes, you can make these same noodles with whole wheat flour if you want. There isn’t any need to create a separate 100% whole wheat spinach pasta dough recipe, though. You can simply substitute the whole wheat flour for the all purpose white flour in the recipe up above. It will still work just fine like that, so there isn’t anything to worry about.
Can You Make a Gluten Free Spinach Pasta?
I think some people clicked on this page hoping to find a pasta recipe that involved spinach instead of flour or any other kind of gluten. I’m sorry to dash your hopes there, but there are some alternatives to gluten flour that you can use.
You can make this with rice flour or cauliflower flour, if you like. Any kind of gluten free flour will work, but you may have to tweak the recipe slightly for your noodles to come out okay. Look for a recipe that uses the kind of flour or flour substitute you are wanting. That way, you can be sure you have specific directions that work with your chosen ingredient.
I'm Pauline, a mother of four grown children, my passion for cooking stemmed from the joy i get cooking for my family. I love to try new dishes, especially when dining out but creating and sharing my own recipes is my favourite thing to do!
