Cooking Classics : Homemade Egg Noodles

Cooking Classics

Is a series meant to revisit classic recipes or techniques for tastier, healthier, less expensive everyday meals and as an alternative to convenience and fast-foods. Most of the classic fares from the popular cuisines of the world have today an industrially made version. While it is sometimes convenient to spend more and settle for a less tasty and less healthy store-bought meal, it pays both money-wise and health-wise to know techniques and basic recipes along with pantry and lelftover management to enjoy their homemade tasty and healty versions.

Nouilles Aux Oeufs Maison, version française ici.

Though most of the time I buy ready made noodles and pastas, from time to time I find it’s such a treat to make them from scratch at home. Granted this is the kind of food witch is rather time consuming, and consequently the pasta machine is put to use much less frequently than the food processor in our fast paced household.

Few years ago I found a recipe for homemade egg noodles which is quicker and easier to make than most pasta from scratch recipes and which doesn’t require the use of a pasta machine. The dough is rolled out thin with a roller pin on a well floured surface then rolled “jelly-roll” fashion and cut in strips. I find this method quicker than dividing the dough in several pieces, each of them then passed through the pasta machine several time before they are cut in the desired shape.

This recipe is from the book by Marianna Olszewska Heberle “German Cooking” sub-titled “The Complete Guide to Preparing Classic and Modern German Cuisine, Adapted For The American Kitchen”.

Among the vast array of simple recipes from this book, one of our favorite ones is the Homemade Egg Noodles. My sons (aged 5, 8 and 11 years old) often take care of the rolling and cutting of the dough after I used my food processor to make it. They have lots of fun doing it and this gives me that much free time proceeding to the making of the rest of the dinner. When I need my noodles to look… errrr…. less “whimsy-shaped”, I roll out and cut the dough myself or ask Edin, my older son, to do it “seriously”. It isn’t complicated and I don’t find it’s tremendously time consuming compared to say, peeling and chopping vegetables for an american spaghetti sauce.

There’s lots of advantages to take the time to make homemade egg noodles. They are very versatile. I use these noodles as a side dish for hearty stews or crispy roasts. I also serve them sometimes buttered and simply sprinkled with salt, pepper and parmesan cheese as an appetizer. They are divine with a lemon-shrimp sauce as a main dish and they enhance the quality of other concoctions such as noodle casseroles or chicken noodle soup. They also cost only a fraction of their store-bought version. Only 3 inexpensive ingredients we all are most likely to have in the pantry and fridge are necessary. And the taste… So much better than the commercial ones!

In the book, the instructions are given for making the dough by hand. I find it more convenient and quick to do it in the food processor and then finish the kneading by hand for 2 or 3 minutes.


Homemade Egg Noodles

2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 egss lightly beaten
About 1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon salt

Combine flour and salt in a medium bowl. Add eggs and water (or put everything in a food processor fitted with the metal blade). Work mixture into a stiff dough, using more or less water depending on the absorbtion capacity of the flour. Knead for 10 to 15 minutes if you do it by hand. In the food processor, mix until the dough almost forms a ball and then continue kneading by hand 2 or 3 minutes.

Wrap the dough with plastic and allow to rest for half an hour.

After that time, roll out the dough to less than 1/8th of an inch thick, sprinkling both your working surface and the dough with flour. When the dough is thin enough sprinkle it with flour on the top, turn it on the other side and sprinkle again. Allow to dry for 30 minutes, turning it once after 15 minutes.


Roll the dough loosely jelly-roll fashion but not too tightly. Cut crosswise into thin noodle strips. Unroll the strips and lay them on your work surface as you go (a great job for a kid)





If you wish, you can cut strips in smaller bits like I did for part of the recipe in order to add them to a chicken noodle soup. This part is also a great job for a little helper. My 5 years old doesn’t allow me to do that. :-))


To cook, bring a large pot of salted water to a rapid boil. Drop the noodles into the boiling water and stir. Be carefull to choose a big enough pot or lower the heat to medium-high to avoid water overflow while the pasta cooks. Cook 15 to 20 minutes or until the noodles are cooked through.

Drain and rinse the cooked noodles with hot water and immediately add butter or oil to prevent sticking. Season as you wish. I simply use butter, salt pepper and fresh parmesan shavings on ours.

You can cook the noodles and rinse them thouroughly with cold water, then store them in the fridge to enjoy after a long workind week-day. Just bring water to boil and add the cold pasta. Allow the water to come back to a boil. Drain and season as you would for freshly cooked pasta.