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Macaroni Paste

A stiff dough of flour, egg and water, rolled thin and cut into ribbons or squares for pasta.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Macaroni Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Place the flour on a clean surface and make a well in the center.

  2. Crack the egg into the well and pour in the water.

  3. Knead the mixture until it forms a very stiff paste.

  4. Cut the paste into manageable pieces.

Roll and cut

  1. Flour the surface and roll out each piece as thin as possible.

  2. Cut the rolled paste into narrow ribbon strips or squares.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Best wheaten flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the pasta its structure.
Egg
Adds fat and protein that enrich the dough and help it set firm when cooked.
Water
Hydrates the flour so the proteins can form gluten and bind the dough together.

The step that matters

Knead the mixture until it forms a very stiff paste. Kneading develops the gluten network that gives pasta its elasticity. If the dough is under-kneaded it will be crumbly and tear when rolled, while too much water makes it sticky and hard to work.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.