This Might Be The Easiest Way To Make Homemade Spaghetti Noodles

Did Marie Kondo's bestselling book "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" inspire you to question whether your possessions "sparked joy" or not? Perhaps you are more of a Cleo and Joanna fan and binge-watched both seasons of "The Home Edit," embracing "the system." Regardless of which method you prefer, at some point, we all need to cull through our possessions which multiply over our lifetime and say goodbye to items that no longer make us happy. 

For some, collecting kitchen items begins when they register for their wedding or move into their first apartment. As aspiring young cooks, we register for appliances like waffle irons, stand mixers, and good-intentioned gadgets which are seldom used and take up valuable real estate. As our lives become increasingly digital, home cooks are using the internet as a resource for all phases of meal planning, including food hacks that make some of those one-trick-ponies obsolete. According to Danny O'Brien, the tech geek who coined the term "life hacks" in 2003, "hacks are often a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix." 

Although using the term "food hack" has gotten out of hand, these creative solutions benefit home cooks with limited space or a tight budget. Kitchen gadgets with more than one purpose up their sleeve spark joy, especially when they are used to create homemade pasta. Although some pasta shapes only require a rolling pin, like fettuccini and linguini, rounded spaghetti is not one of them. Luckily, we have a hack for that!

Taste of Home has listed a dozen ways to repurpose kitchen gadgets like the French press or tube pan, including using a meat grinder for making spaghetti. Meat grinders have been around for centuries, used in commercial and home kitchens to chop and mince meats. They can be stand-alone gadgets or attachments for stand mixers. However, if previously used for raw meat, thoroughly clean the machine and remove the cutting blade before making spaghetti. 

Although you don't need to alter your favorite pasta dough recipe to use the meat grinder, Grindily offers some tips for success. Begin with a recipe that creates a binding, crumbly structure using egg and semolina flour. Bosch's YouTube video demonstrates that you barely knead the ingredients before forming the dough into a log. After a 30-minute rest, the dough is ready to cut. The spaghetti can be cut to any length; however, keep them uniform to ensure it cooks simultaneously for about 3 minutes. Cut pasta can be nested on floured trays as you continue with the recipe. If the noodles are breaking or look uneven, you may need to adjust the speed of the machine.

Since most meat grinders come with different-sized disks, cooks have options for the thickness of the noodle. Try using the meat grinder on Mario Batali's Bigoli Scuri (a whole wheat spaghetti from Sicily) or Chinese dan dan noodles. The process is so simple and quick that you may use the meat grinder to make pasta more often than for making sausage.