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Spinach Fettuccine with a Squeezed-Dry Purée
By The Dough Table14 Oct 2026

Ribbons & Strands · Core

Spinach Fettuccine with a Squeezed-Dry Purée

菠菜细扁面（fettuccine），菜泥必须挤干

The green in this pasta comes from 55 g of spinach purée that has been blanched, shocked and wrung out in a cloth until it stops dripping. Skip the wringing and you will be adding flour all afternoon to save a dough that was never going to hold.

Flours
Doppio Zero soft wheat (00)
Egg
Whole eggs and vegetable purée
Water
51%
Sheet
1.2 mm
Cut
6.5 mm
Drying
Coiled into a nest · 16h
Work
55 min + 25 min rest
Serves
5

1The ratio

portions
Spinach Fettuccine with a Squeezed-Dry Purée — 5 portions
Flourgbaker’s %
Doppio Zero soft wheat (00)400100%
Egg3 whole eggs51%
purée5514%
olive oil123%
salt41%
Dough weight621 g51% Water

Per portion ≈ 124 g. Every ratio on this site is a baker’s percentage against the flour weight.

2The roller

1.2mm
  1. 14.8 mm
  2. 24.2 mm
  3. 33.4 mm
  4. 42.6 mm
  5. 52 mm
  6. 61.6 mm
  7. 71.2 mm
  8. 80.9 mm
  9. 90.6 mm

Notch by notch 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 6 → 7

Cut at 7 (1.2 mm) → 6 mm Cut

Sauce for this

Ricotta, walnut and sage

里科塔、核桃与鼠尾草

Ricotta, walnut and sage picks up the vegetal note in the pasta rather than covering it. A tomato sauce would bury the spinach entirely, which is the point of making green pasta in the first place.

Holds 4% butter

Flour

  • 200 g sheep's ricotta
  • 70 g walnuts, roughly broken
  • 60 g butter, 8 sage leaves
  • 1 tbsp honey
  • 1 tsp lemon zest
  • 50 g parmigiano

Method

  1. Toast the walnuts in a dry pan, then crush them lightly with the flat of a knife.
  2. Brown the butter with the sage until it smells of hazelnuts.
  3. Off the heat, fold in the ricotta, the walnuts and the honey.
  4. Finish with lemon zest and parmigiano; loosen with pasta water.

Honey is not there to sweeten. A teaspoon cuts the bitterness of the walnut skins and makes the ricotta taste richer.

Wringing is the whole recipe

Blanch 250 g of spinach for 40 seconds, shock it in ice water, then squeeze it in a clean tea towel until the cloth stops showing green. You will be left with roughly 55 g of dry-ish purée from 250 g of leaves — a five-to-one reduction that most recipes quietly leave out.

If the purée is wet, the dough needs 60 g of extra flour to reach the same consistency, the spinach percentage drops by a fifth, and the colour fades from deep green to a tired olive.

Working the purée into the flour

Whisk the purée into the beaten eggs first, then add the mixture to the flour well. Adding purée directly to the flour gives you green lumps that never fully break down, and those lumps become weak points in the sheet at notch 6.

The dough should be a uniform deep green with no marbling. If you can still see darker specks, knead another two minutes before resting it.

Rolling green dough

Spinach dough is slightly more fragile than plain 00, so the sequence skips notch 5 and goes 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 6 - 7. Skipping a middle notch keeps the sheet moving rather than letting it sit and take on moisture from the air.

Watch for a pale halo at the edges of the sheet from notch 6 onward. That halo means the purée was not evenly dispersed and the outer 5 mm has less vegetable matter than the centre; trim it off rather than letting it become a brittle edge on every strand.

Cooking and keeping the colour

Two and a half minutes in well-salted water. Chlorophyll is heat-sensitive, and past three minutes the green turns dull brown no matter what you do afterwards.

Do not add lemon juice or vinegar to the water hoping to fix the colour. Acid turns chlorophyll grey-olive by a different route. The only reliable way to keep green pasta green is to cook it briefly and sauce it immediately.

Drying

  1. Dust with semolina and nest 80 g at a time.
  2. Dry 16 hours in a dark room; light bleaches the surface of green pasta within a day.
  3. Turn the nests at hour 6 so the underside dries at the same rate.
  4. Dry spinach nests smell faintly of tea, not of grass.

Keeping Three weeks in a paper bag kept inside a cupboard — out of light, which is the real enemy here. A nest left on an open shelf goes from deep green to olive in about ten days.

When it goes wrong

Dough will not come together
Because The purée was not squeezed dry enough, so the hydration is far above the stated 51%.
Do this Knead in 20 g of 00 at a time until it holds. Next time weigh the purée after wringing — 55 g from 250 g of leaves is the target.
Green turns olive in the pot
Because Cooked past three minutes.
Do this Set a timer. There is no recovery; the pigment has already changed.
Pale streaks in the sheet
Because Purée not fully dispersed into the egg.
Do this Whisk purée and egg together until the mixture is a single flat colour before it meets the flour.

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