apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

When I dried my pasta and stored it last time, it became all moldy and inedible after a week or so. Maybe I just didn't get it dried completely?

We had a pasta/cheese making workshop at a friend's house recently, and ran into the same situation (lack of drying rack). We ended up using a broom balanced on the backs of two chairs, covered with a dish towel. Worked great!

i don't dry it. when we make it, we eat it all right away. what we can't eat, we flour and put in the freezer. mmmmm i want some pasta now!

We do the same thing with hangers, hanging them on the cupboard door.

Cheriey, I think I'ma do that. I don't like the thought of leaving pasta out when I have cats. I try my best, but there is fur always floating about.

We only make what we're planning on eating, so we're not so picky about drying. Generally we'll lay some tinfoil out on top of the microwave and toaster. The laundry rack is a good idea, but ours is wall-mounted in the bathroom, and bathroom pasta-drying does not sound like a good idea.

Like the others, I tend to cook & serve the whole batch at once, though I do hang it to dry for a little bit to prevent it from becoming a gloppy mess in the water. But I've always wondered about the best way to store it for later use. The pasta gets brittle pretty quickly when it's hanging, at least in my dry environment.

I'd read somewhere that you should twirl the strands into little nests and make sure they're completely dry before storing (to avoid the moldy situation sleggo described). But I've never tried it and wonder whether the pasta strands would end up sticking together.

Faith, maybe you could ask your mother-in-law?

I was making pasta with my daughter and I totally ran into this issue when it was ready to hang. I pulled all of my wooden spoons out of the drawer put them on top of my fridge with a can sitting on the round part.
Poof! A drying rack.

My Mennonite Grandmother used to make all of her own pasta (narrow, broad, etc). Us grandchildren (well, the girls anyway...segregation and all that *wink*) would help.

She would sprinkle the cut and ready to be dried pasta over the many tables she had in her basement kitchen (we're a big family, lots of long tables) that she had covered with paper and dusted with flour. There would be 8, 9, even 10 loooong tables FULL of drying pasta, and she'd go around , fluffing it and flipping it and leaving it sit until it was totally dry.

I really want some of that pasta again.

...project time!

Forgive my inexperience here...

After you dry pasta, does it become like regular, dry, store-bought pasta? In which case, can I put it into bags and store them? How long do they last if they're dried? Frozen?

I really want to make some pasta, but I live alone, so there's no way I can eat a whole batch.

@chowbella... and everyone else who asked about storage - I will indeed ask my mother-in-law about storing pasta. But she did say that her mother froze most of the fresh pasta she made.

I tried drying pasta over the weekend but it cracked and broke apart after only 20 minutes of drying so i had to throw it out. Maybe I used too much flour? I don't know.

Oh man. This series on making your own pasta definitely piqued my interest... until i saw this post. Turning my entire apt into a pasta drying factory sounds like a freaking nightmare and way more work than i'm willing to get involved with. Good luck to the rest of you brave souls! :)

That made me laugh so hard, mh330! Really - it's not so bad. But I certainly can sympathize with the sentiment!

Wouldn't it make sense to coil it so it's easier to store once dry? How do you store these long straight bits without breaking them??

Please don't eat that piece of pasta that is touching the floor in the picture above!