Durum Flour Pasta Dough

This is basically exactly the same as Mita Antolini’s pasta fresca (here), but substitute 3 cups durum flour (semola rimacinata) for the 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour. This is the recipe to use for pasta alla chitarra or for any sort of ravioli that needs a particularly strong envelope around the filling (Ravioli con Ricotta Melanzane Bruciacchiate, here, for example).

Once you gain confidence in your pasta-making skills, you can start to play around with different flours as well. In Tuscany and in Liguria, two places where chestnuts are an important resource, cooks commonly add a little sweet chestnut flour to the dough, and many fresh pasta makers swear by a small amount of semola rimacinata added to egg pasta dough for both flavor and structure. Farro and buckwheat flour are also sometimes mixed in (not together), and if you have access to local flours, we encourage you to experiment. A ratio of one part alternative flour to two parts regular flour would be a good place to start, remembering that if there is no gluten in the flour (as in chestnut or buckwheat), you probably cannot add more than a third. If you add too much, the resulting dough will lack elasticity.