You get your hands on some nettle, with very sturdy gloves on. Pick off only the tops of the plant as it's the freshest and most undamaged part. Lower leaves will have a bug situation going on!
Boil the nettle for a minute, then blend it with some of the water, until it looks like a green smoothie.
I approximated how much flour I can mix with this amount of nettle juice, and added some salt and a spoon of oil. So this is what I'm doing:
Then you mix it all with a fork until it turns into green dough! It is such a beautiful vivid green color it looked like kneading play-dough. You get it out of the bowl and kneed it, adding more flour because it's very sticky at this point. Kneed until it feels smooth and supple and very pleasant under the fingers, it usually just takes a few minutes.
Once you're done kneading, put it back into the bowl, cover with a lid or a plate, and let it rest for 30 minutes. This is important because it will make the dough elastic and developed enough to properly roll into pasta. If you try rolling it immediately, it will break and make trouble for you.
After 30 minutes of rest, if you have a big ball of dough like me, split it into two smaller ones, and roll out as thin as you comfortably can! You can also do the favourite thickness that you like to eat, but know that it will expand with cooking so, little thinner than you'd like your final product to be.
When it's rolled out, you can use a butter knife to cut into whatever you like, I go for wide strips because they're the easiest to handle.
Now it's time to cook. These are very sticky and love sticking to each other, so you can't just throw them all in a pot, they will stick together. I go around this by placing them one-by-one into the boiling water, this way the water helps them stay separate. Homemade fresh pasta only needs 30 seconds of boiling to be cooked! So you need much less time and energy from the stove to be done.
After mine were done cooking, I took the pasta out and fried some garlic to make a garlicky pasta dish, and it was done super fast and delicious.
The pros of making the nettle pasta: It genienly tastes better than the ordinary pasta, nettle is filled with calcium and iron so you add a lot of nutrients to the flour, and you use a free resource to make something good, one thing you don't have to buy at the store! And they're green and pretty to look at.
If you want to dry your pasta for later use, transport them onto a clean cloth after cutting into strips, and they should be dry in a day or two, depending on your kitchen size. After they dry on one side, flip them and let the other side dry as well. You can keep them in a tall jar, they look very pretty and ornamental in the kitchen.
Additional knowledge: if you tried to make this without boiling the nettle first, as I have once, for fresh pasta that you mean to immediately eat, it's okay, you can do that, it doesn't get this pretty green color but it's fine and tastes great. But if you try to dry pasta with fresh nettle in it. It tastes absolutely rancid. Don't do it. It's a bad idea. Boil nettle first.
