Who would be so crazy to try fermenting pasta? Well, I tried and it turned out to be my personal favorite pasta. Thanks to sourdough you are inflicting just a tiny bit of acidity into the final dough, making it the perfect companion for creamy, spicy or sweet sauces.

I have been making fresh pasta for a while at home. The ingredients are super simple and I highly recommend it. But what if you were to ferment the pasta? You would have a more delicious dough that’s also more digestible. Furthermore you would end up with pasta featuring slight acidity. Definitely something I never heard of, I had to try.

Leading to this recipe was my stiff starter that I have been using for a while now.

The stiff starter favors the yeast part of your sourdough starter more, rather than the bacterial part. This is a game changer for many recipes where you only want mild acidity. The bacteria is responsible for digesting the gluten network. That’s why after a while your dough always turns into a sticky mess. That’s something we definitely want to avoid for the pasta. So the stiff starter it is. You can read more on the topic of stiff starters here.

The full process

This is the full process from start to finish.

Please note I let the dough cold ferment for 4 weeks in the fridge, but you can definitely already eat the pasta the same day or a day later .

Making the stiff starter

This recipe assumes that you have a sourdough starter. If you don’t have one yet please check out my tutorial on YouTube

After making your regular starter simply change the hydration of your starter to around 50%. This will boost your yeast. Give your starter one last feeding before starting with the recipe.

Mixing ingredients

Then proceed and mix together all the ingredients. 200 grams of flour will yield you a nice dinner for 2 persons. With the baker’s math percentages you can adjust the recipe easily for more people. The key is really to make a very stiff dough. If you don’t like eggs, you can definitely replace them with water too.

Ingredient	Weight in grams	Baker's math	Comment
Bread flour	200 grams	100.00%	A high gluten flour ideally
2 Eggs size m	100 grams	50.00%
OR Water (instead of eggs)	100 grams	50.00%
Stiff sourdough starter	40 grams	20.00%
Salt	2 grams	1.00%

Afterwards place your dough in an airtight container. Wait until your dough has increased by around 50% in size.

Once your dough is ready you can either make pasta right away or you can cold ferment it for an even enhanced taste.

Cold ferment

To cold ferment make sure your fridge is below 4°C (40°F), or else your pasta will get quite sour. I recommend to taste your pasta every once in a while, or smell it at least. If you notice it gets quite sour, proceed and make the pasta. If your dough becomes too sour then your gluten will break down and you can no longer roll the pasta. Overfermenting is a big danger here.

In case it happens, I recommend to use your dough and simply make some crackers out of it.

Rolling out the pasta

Proceed and roll out your pasta in any shape that you like. The only limit is your creativity.

You can also watch the full video on the YouTube channel

Pairing options

In the video I made a Gorgonzola sauce, using the Dolce option. But retrospectively a sweet tomato sauce would have played better with the dish. Please let me know what you liked the most.