Handmade Tagliatelle

Directions

1. Whirl the eggs in the bowl of a food processor; slowly adding the flour, into which the salt has been mixed, cup by cup, until you have a dough that winds around the blade and clears the sides of the bowl. Gather the dough up into a ball and place on floured surface. Cover the dough with a bowl and allow it to rest for 30 minutes.
2. Alternately, make the dough by hand. Mound the flour on a work surface; make a hole in the center of the flour and crack the eggs into it. Break the eggs up with a fork taking care not to break through the wall of flour. Begin bringing in the flour from the inside of the flour wall and mix with the eggs until a ball of dough is formed. You may not need all the flour. Push the excess aside. Knead the dough until it is smooth and allow it to rest as above.
3. Divide the dough into 4 pieces and flatten each one with a rolling pin into roughly 4 x 5 inches. Thin the dough in a hand crank pasta machine using the settings on the knob. Pass the dough through the rollers and thin them until they are the thickness of a sheet of copy paper.
4. Allow the sheets to dry on a flat, floured surface until they are just damp to the touch, and then pass them through the cutter for fettucine. At this point you are either going to cook them immediately by dropping the strands into boiling salted water, or dry them for future use. To dry them, separate the strands and hang them on a drying rack or on dowel rods propped between two chairs. They are totally dry when the ends curl. Slide the strands off the dowel rods onto a sheet of aluminum foil. Close and save for future use. They will keep up to a year.
5. Use 2 cups of sauce to dress 1 pound of tagliatelle as a first course. Try it with classic Bolognese Sauce for a real treat!