Stinging Nettle Pasta

Stinging nettle pasta adds great color and some added nutrition to your pasta dishes.

How many of you have started foraging now that we are in lockdown? Since there are no longer frequent visits to the grocery store – in fact none in our case since we are ordering everything for home delivery – there’s always something you forget to order. Plus grocery stores are not as well-stocked as they were before lockdown. We’re blessed with a large piece of land so we’re doing a lot more foraging than we did in the past: things like cicoria, calamint, lots of herbs, wild garlic, arugula and stinging nettle. I use stinging nettle frequently to make soups and different kinds of stinging nettle pasta. It adds nutritional greens to your pasta and a lot of beautiful color!

Make sure you wear gloves when you pick and wash the stinging nettle because it does sting! As soon as you cook the stinging nettle the sting goes away. Cook it as you would for spinach: in a large covered pot with just a small bit of water (1/3 cup) only until wilted.

There are two important things to remember when you use these greens to add color to your stinging nettle pasta. First, make sure you squeeze the greens until almost bone dry. I use an inexpensive dish towel to do this:

My husband twists the towel in one direction and I twist in the other and it sure makes the process a lot faster and more efficient! Here’s what a pot full of cooked stinging nettle reduces to once it’s squeezed dry:

The second thing is to finely mince the stinging nettle. That way it blends into the pasta dough beautifully! Bear in mind that the stinging nettle, no matter how dry you get it, will still add a bit of moisture to your dough. Consequently you may need to sprinkle in additional flour as needed so the dough achieves the right consistency. Follow my recipe for basic pasta and take a look at my post on stinging nettle fettuccine for recipes and technique details!

Your ball of stinging nettle pasta dough will look like this:

You’ll need a dough scraper for your pasta board or work surface.
If you don’t have a pasta machine to roll out your pasta then you should probably get one if you enjoy making homemade pasta!
After the pasta is made I dry it out on this pasta drying rack:

You can serve stinging nettle pasta with almost any kind of sauce. I especially love it with my amatriciana sauce, or cherry tomatoes and fried eggplant or even alla Carbonara!
Or just a simple tomato sauce sprinkled with Parmesan cheese.

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