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I've made my own pasta for the first time today. While the results were far from bad, it was not perfect. It looked a little bit too "fluffy" when compared to store-bought pasta (I mean the more or less fresh ones you get at the refrigerator and not dried) and once it was cooked it grew too much in size.

I've seen some discussions on this site regarding for instance adding more or less eggs, or only egg yolks, etc.

I would like to know how these proportions affect the pasta in itself. While of course I can eat it how I want, I like to do things as traditional and "rule-following" way as possible. Some questions that come on top of my head are, for instance: What is the effect of adding only yolks, more eggs, less eggs, salt (does it do anything besides taste)? Should the pasta be overworked, or very little?

I understand is a question with multiple questions, I am just looking for general advice on how to master the recipe based on a few factors.

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  • Pasta will vary in shape depending on the die, so comparing it to store bought pasta may not be apples to apples. What was it about the texture you didn't like about the finished product? – GdD Nov 28 '20 at 21:00
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    Be sure to get bread flour with gluten. I was once showing a neighbor how easy it was to make pasta. But I had cake flour - I did not give her a good demonstration. – blacksmith37 Nov 28 '20 at 22:13
  • The answer you got before I put this on hold does a pretty good job of demonstrating why multi-question general advice questions aren't a great fit for StackExchange - we can't really expect people to write whole articles as answers. – Cascabel♦ Nov 29 '20 at 6:22
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Serious Eats had a pretty thorough discussion of this a few years ago: https://www.seriouseats.com/2015/01/best-easy-all-purpose-fresh-pasta-dough-recipe-instructions.html

They discuss how different egg white / yolk / water proportions affect the pasta, and also touch on some other issues that you mentioned (like salt and that you need to work it sufficiently to develop the correct elasticity), and they also discussed how resting the dough affected it, and had pictures to show how things changed.

And if you're not used to fresh pasta, I would also recommend reading my answer to a related question : https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/112587/67

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  • I hope that my discussion of why the link is important will get me around complaints of a 'link only answer'. There is no way that I could do a fair summary of that article without some major plagiarism issues. – Joe Nov 28 '20 at 21:18

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