Homemade fresh pasta, lightly dusted with flour and kept in a closed container in the fridge, should be used within 1-2 days; unlike dried pasta, fresh strands stick and clump together quickly.
For a longer wait, fresh pasta can be frozen; spread out in a thin layer and frozen until firm before being transferred to a bag, it keeps in the freezer for up to a month.
How do you keep it from sticking?
Cut pasta strands should be lightly but generously dusted with semolina or flour before going into the fridge; this thin coating keeps the strands from fusing together. Stuck-together pasta tends to tear when you try to separate it.
Laying pasta out in a single layer on a tray and covering it with a slightly damp cloth stops sticking while slowing surface drying; tightly wrapped plastic film, on the other hand, traps moisture and can make sticking worse.
How do you cook frozen fresh pasta?
Frozen fresh pasta can go straight into boiling water without thawing; in fact thawing it beforehand makes the strands gummy and prone to falling apart. Cooking time runs only a minute or two longer than unfrozen fresh pasta.
Fresh pasta made with an egg dough dries out a bit faster in the fridge than plain flour pasta, which makes using egg pasta within a day the safer choice.
Can it be turned into dried pasta?
Fresh pasta can be turned into dried pasta by hanging it on a thin rack and letting it sit at room temperature for a few days; pasta dried this way can then keep in the pantry for months just like store-bought dried pasta.
Drying in a humid spot can let mold take hold, so the drying process needs to happen somewhere airy and dry; in a humid kitchen, freezing is the safer choice over drying.
Pasta left half-dried, somewhere between fresh and fully dry, is the riskiest stage; it's vulnerable to both mold and sticking at that point, so it should either be dried the rest of the way or frozen, not left in between.
If fresh pasta is briefly flash-frozen on a tray before going into a bag, it won't turn into one solid mass, and the amount needed can easily be pulled out later.
Filled fresh pasta like ravioli or dumplings follow similar rules to cut strand pasta, though the moisture in the filling usually calls for a slightly shorter fridge window.
Using semolina instead of flour for fresh pasta leaves less residue than a flour coating and keeps the cooking water clearer, a difference that shows up especially if the pasta is going into a clear soup.
Fresh pasta that's spent a night in the fridge sticks less once it hits boiling water if it's left at room temperature for a few minutes first, thanks to the smaller temperature jump.
Fresh pasta is a short-lived product, but properly dusted and wrapped, it can safely wait in both the fridge and the freezer.
Making just enough fresh pasta for a few days at a time, rather than a big batch all at once, and storing the leftover dough instead, generally gives a better result than storing cooked pasta.
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