50 People Try to Make Dough

This ain't no dough.

We forgot something.

[laughs] We forgot something. [laughs]

Probably need more flour.

[bright music]

I am making pasta dough.

[woman laughs]

Ah.

[utensil clicks]

[pot clangs]

Yeah, okay, we can make a bowl of dough.

Flour.

Definitely need that.

God only knows how much flour is in here.

Do I need water?

I'm not sure.

Go ahead and put all this in here.

Help the mixture, um, stick together better.

I'm gonna crack the egg first, I think.

Shall we?

[egg tapping]

Go, [laughs] come on.

You come back to the egg later on.

It's fine, it's fine, we got this.

Kinda disgusting.

Do I need milk?

I feel like milk goes.

Milk is gonna be our binder here.

I'm gonna put some oil.

I think the oil probably helps the dough

kinda come together and stay, almost like a glue.

Shh.

And I'm gonna whisk it together with something?

No. Oh no, guys.

You know, I hate using a whisk the few times I have

because it always gets all caught.

I think I've lost half my dough in here.

[laughs] How am I gonna get it out?

All inside.

Yeah. [laughs]

So I think it's coming along, ish.

Actually I think I'm about to make pancakes.

This dough is too wet and it is wrong.

The consistency looks horrible.

This does not look great.

Perhaps I added a little bit too much water.

I'm not sure what I'm doing here.

[man grunts]

Do I have to touch this?

I think I just have to put my hands in there.

[whimpering] No.

[gasps] Oh my gosh.

Oh boy, that's.

Oh, nice.

I think I botched it.

Gross.

This is definitely not the texture that I'm looking for.

This is bad.

I wish it was more ball-like.

Form a ball, just form a ball.

Oh, water.

I am gonna show you a ball of dough.

Regular all-purpose flour.

Create a well in the middle.

Like a little volcano hole.

The egg goes right in the middle of the well.

It's in its little house.

I'm gonna just whisk it with a fork.

You wanna gradually add the flour

to the egg to make a paste.

Put a pinch of salt in.

I'll put some water in here.

And then once it's dry enough to start handling

with my hands, I can start to do that.

Here I go smushing it together.

This is what I love doing, kneading.

You're, like, massaging the dough.

That's what kneading is.

It takes a little while.

And you're gonna have to let it rest

before you can roll it out

and make all your funky pasta shapes.

It's good to go, you got your dough.

And you'll know it's done

when you taste it and it feels like pasta.

[tape whirring]

[music rewinding]

Okay, so we're going to make a fresh pasta dough today.

What I'm gonna do is just kind of push this in

nice and tight on itself

so that I get a little bit of a mound of flour like this,

and then I'm gonna take two fingers

and I'm gonna make a well in the center.

We always wanna make sure that we mix our wet ingredients

before we add them to our dry ingredients

so that we get the right ratio of dry to wet

when we're making the dough.

Egg, we're gonna break that egg first.

What I'm gonna do here is add roughly an ounce or two

of water just to get this started,

and I'm gonna take a fork

and I'm just gonna gently beat this.

Now, the next thing I'm gonna do

is I'm gonna add my wet to my dry.

So I'm gonna start just by filling the well.

Just take a little bit of the flour with your fork

and work your way around the dough.

I kinda use my hands to stabilize as I work,

and kinda help ease the flour into the mixture.

All right, I'm pretty gentle here.

Basically the rule of thumb is you can stop with the fork

when the dough's not gonna run away from you.

I'm just going to start folding the mass in the center

to absorb the flour that's around it.

Pasta dough relies on gluten for structure

and gluten is a protein that benefits

from being moved around,

and those gluten strands are what give the pasta

that chewy kind of bite that we get

from a good high-quality pasta.

Now, you can see the texture's starting

to change a little bit, right, and that's a good thing.

I'm just sort of moving the dough around,

folding it on itself.

You'll notice if I press that,

you can watch it spring right back, and that's a good sign

that I have a decent amount of gluten.

Okay, so that's our pasta dough.

[bright playful music]

Dough.

[woman laughs]

Well, I, it's interpretive.