Edible Flowers Pasta Recipe
With Valentine’s Day Dinner just a week away, it’s the perfect time to use some edible flowers for pasta! This garden-inspired recipe is so subtle and lovely. Plus, homemade pasta from scratch is the actual most delicious food.
There are dozens of edible flowers, but I chose these primroses for three reasons. First, their shape – the petals are heart-shaped. Second, when you take the stem off the flower, they’ll hold their shape, giving a really pretty full flower in the pasta (if you try to make the pasta with the stem attached at all, it could rip the pasta sheet). Third, the colors. I love the red, pink, purple palette for Valentine’s Day.
I also added some parsley to this dish, to add some green. The leaves are pretty and flat, being the perfect addition.
Perfecting Flower Pasta
The key to great pasta with flowers and herbs in it is to getting flat flowers and herbs, and to getting thin pasta sheets. You end up pressing two sheets of pasta together, to close the flowers within the dough. Everything needs to be thin to be easily run through the pasta maker.
The pasta maker that I use is the Atlas 180 and I adore it. We’ve had ours for about four years and it is so simple with the perfect lasagne, fettuccine, or angel hair options.
Tips for homemade pasta
I have tried many many homemade pasta recipes, and the key for me is to use 00 flour (this is special pasta and bread flour), as well as at least one extra egg yolk. I have tried recipes that add olive oil or water but find that if you knead the dough enough and have that extra yolk, you don’t need those.
I hope you’ll give this easy dish a try, as it’s so beautiful and delicious. You can use pansies, violas, calendula petals, and many other flower options.
HOMEMADE FLOWER PETAL PASTA
Pasta dough recipe
- 2 cups 00 flour
- 3 eggs + 1 yolk
- About 15 edible flowers
- A few sprigs of parsley
Create a mound with your flour and then make a well with your hands in the center of it. Drop the eggs into the well and use a fork to fold them into the flour until a shaggy dough forms. Use your hands to shape the dough into a ball, kneading until the yellow dough is smooth and easy to handle. It will be slightly sticky.
Wrap your dough in saran wrap and set aside for 30 minutes.
Once your dough has rested, use a bench scraper to cut your dough into four pieces. Working with one piece at a time, flatten your dough into a rectangle and dust with flour very lightly.
Start at setting “0” on your pasta machine and run it through the machine on each numbered setting up to about seven.
At this point, your pasta sheet should be very thin and long – about two feet long. Cut it in half, in the short center so that you have two pieces. Add your flower petals and parsley, and then lay one sheet of pasta on the other.
Reset your pasta machine to a low setting – I used setting 4, to re-flatten your new pasta sheet (which is twice as thick now). Thin out your sheet of pasta to a 6, and then run it through the fettuccine setting to create your pasta noodles.
Enjoy!
For edible flower cookies, go HERE.