5 Essential Gadgets for Handmade Pasta
You’ve read the how-tos. You’ve watched the adorable videos of eccentric Italian chefs running dough through machines and churning out beautiful and delicious-looking pasta. You’ve sampled handmade noodles in restaurants and burst through the door of your home screaming, “It’s my time! Today is my day to finally learn how to make pasta!”
Well, where do you start? What tools do you need, and what can you probably skip? We put together a list of five things you will want if you’d like to make professional-looking long pastas. Sure, you could save some money and make do without any of these tools, but for pasta that makes your friends look up from dinner and suddenly exclaim, “Wait, you made this”? Here’s what you’ll need:
1. Manual Pasta Machine
This one is a no-brainer. Pasta machines serve several purposes—they give you a ton of control when rolling out your dough, both in thickness and in width. You can try rolling out the dough on a table with a rolling pin, but if you’re not precise or careful, your dough will have varying thicknesses and be shaped like a round pizza, instead of a long rectangle. A pasta machine has a dial for different thicknesses of dough, which allow you to create thicker sheets for lasagna, and thinner sheets for angel hair noodles.
Pasta machines can range from $25 at Walmart to $907 from Paderno World Cuisine. I’ve used several different brands over the years, and haven’t been able to identify any noticeable benefits of a more expensive machine except that the cheaper ones cause the pasta to stick a little and roll out less crisp. I recommend the Roma 6 Inch Traditional Style Pasta Machine, setting you back a comfortable $35.15. One plus of the Roma is if you get tired of cranking the machine, you can order an Electric Motor Attachment to do the work for you.
2. Sifter
These things are wonderful. They allow you to evenly distribute flour while you’re kneading, rolling, and cutting the dough. The extra flour keeps the dough from sticking to itself and making a horrific mess; I tend to err on the side of using more on my work surface, not less (clearly this tip is not for the gluten-sensitive).
The sifter pictured above is a Farberware model, which allows you to distribute flour by just squeezing the handle. I prefer this style over the kinds that require one hand to hold, one hand to crank, because you can keep kneading the dough while you add flour. I found my sifter at a thrift store, totally clean, for about two dollars—they seem to show up pretty often in cooking sections. Another cheaper alternative to the sifter is a dredge shaker, which does basically the same thing. However, they hold less flour than a sifter, so you may need to keep refilling.
3. Bench Scraper