Drying Noodles for Future Use

If “fresh” means “soft,” homemade egg pasta is not necessarily fresh. It is soft the moment it’s made and it can be cooked then, but if one waits it will dry, a natural process with which there is no reason to interfere. All the artificial methods by which commercial “fresh” pasta is kept soft—sprinkling with cornmeal, covering with plastic wrap, refrigeration—undermine its structure and consistency. Properly dried homemade egg pasta, when cooked, delivers all the texture and flavor it had when just made. The limp product marketed as “fresh” does not. Once dried, homemade noodles can be stored for weeks in a cupboard, just like a box of store-bought semolina pasta.