The easy way to make pasta at home

IF YOU see someone making pasta on a cooking show, they are usually mixing white flour with egg yolks, then rolling the dough out thinly with a machine. This is one way to do it, but most pasta isn’t made from flour and eggs – and you don’t need any special gadgets to make it.

Most Italian pasta is made from a different wheat to the kind ordinary flour comes from. Called durum wheat (Triticum durum), it thrives in drier regions like southern Italy, and it gets its name from the Latin word for hard. The kernels appear glass-like, or …