I’m a Pasta-Obsessive. Here’s Everything You Need to Make Pasta at Home. | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Alexander Aciman

Alexander Aciman is an editor who has written about pasta-making, running gear, and Wirecutter picks he has spotted on TV shows.

Homemade pasta is the greatest dinner-party trick: Present a guest with a bowl of fresh pasta and they’ll look at you as if you have just clicked your heels and transported them to some narrow, cobblestoned street in Rome or Naples.

But you don’t need to be an Italian grandma or a Michelin-starred chef to pull it off. It’s easier than you might imagine, and even your first messy attempt will produce some of the best pasta you’ve ever had.

Making pasta has been a part of my Sunday routine for the last seven years. Over the last several years, I’ve learned to make dozens of pasta shapes by hand and amassed an array of pasta-making gear that I’ve used to whip up countless meals and tens of thousands of pieces of pasta for friends and family. It’s my love language.

There are many paths to fresh pasta, from mechanical rollers to forming the dough by hand, piece by piece. You can start simply, with tools you probably already own, but if you want to make more-elaborate shapes and stuffed pastas or churn out dough at a faster rate, my go-to tools below will help you expand your repertoire.

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For me and many others, the greatest benefit of making pasta is that working with dough for extended periods of time feels soothing, almost like occupational therapy. When I am focused on shaping pasta by hand, I quickly find myself in a state of flow that quiets some of the noise in my head. It’s also a great way to step away from screens for a couple hours.

Most pasta is made from one of two kinds of dough: semolina and water or flour and egg. In my experience, most semolina flour labeled for pasta-making performs similarly, so whatever you can buy at the grocery store should do the trick. I’ve gotten consistently good results using Bob’s Red Mill semolina, which is widely available. For wheat flour, I have had success with both King Arthur Baking Company all-purpose flour and Caputo “00” Chef’s Flour.

Though it may seem like pasta-making requires special gear and skill, there’s a good chance you already have everything on hand to make some right now. Cutting perfect strands by hand (video) takes time and practice, but uneven pasta is no less delicious. Perhaps the best way to overcome the intimidation factor is with this stripped-down approach, which you can try using a basic dough recipe from NYT Cooking and some simple items you may already have on hand:

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Most pasta makers come in two varieties: rollers and extruders. The former involves running dough through a series of rollers that you bring closer together with every pass to achieve a thin, uniform sheet. With extruders, the dough is pushed through a mold to create a three-dimensional shape, like rigatoni or fusilli. Because home extruders tend to produce disappointing results, rollers are the best choice for making your own pasta. Here’s my go-to manual option as well as an electric roller our kitchen team swears by.

Marcato Atlas 150 Pasta Machine

This hand-operated pasta roller and cutter set is durable and easy to use, and it churns out silky, fresh pasta.

The Marcato Atlas 150 Pasta Machine is not the Rolls-Royce of home pasta makers. It’s more like the Toyota Camry: reliable, surprisingly durable, well built, compact, and a good value.

I have been using the same Atlas 150 for years, and it performs better than any other comparably priced roller I’ve tried or seen in use. Although it’s easy to find pasta rolling machines that look like the Atlas 150 and use a similar mechanism, its higher build quality, largely composed of metal parts and heavy steel, makes it more durable and longer-lasting.

The Atlas 150 is totally analog: It’s operated with a hand-turned crank, and it must be attached to the edge of a countertop with the included adjustable clamp. It provides a sturdy grip, so long as the counter has at least a 1-inch overhang (flush countertops present a problem for this pasta maker).

To use the Atlas 150, you feed the dough through the rollers several times, raising the setting with each pass until you have a smooth, thin sheet. Then the sheet can be passed through a series of cutting attachments to make different types of pasta.

What shines about the Atlas 150 is its construction. It squeezes dough through its rollers without much difficulty, and most importantly, without breaking the gears inside the machine (which is a problem on cheaper models). I’ve used it for years, and it’s never squeaked, creaked, or chewed up dough. It’s exceedingly easy to clean with a brush and to grease with mineral oil, which is the only maintenance it requires.

While the roller can be used to make full sheets of pasta for lasagna and ravioli, the base model also comes with an attachment that can cut sheets into tagliolini (skinny spaghetti) or wider fettuccine. You can purchase additional cutting attachments for other shapes, such as a thick spaghetti noodle called bigoli, which absorbs sauce magnificently. These attachments cost about $40 each, which felt reasonable when it came to buying one attachment but just costly enough to deter me from buying more of them.

Using the Atlas 150 does require dexterity and elbow grease. The task of catching the pasta can at times feel like juggling, and cranking dough, especially on the lower settings, takes some hand strength. If this is a concern, it may be worth using a mechanical rolling kit, such as the KitchenAid Pasta Roller, instead, which does more of the work for you. Or, consider enlisting a friend—it’s faster, easier, and turns pasta-making into a fun, collaborative effort.

KitchenAid Pasta Roller

This pasta roller attachment offers as good an experience as you could ask for and is easier to operate than manual-crank machines.

If the gambit of feeding a long sheet of pasta through a roller while simultaneously operating a crank feels intimidating, you might prefer the KitchenAid Pasta Roller attachment. It’s easy to use and produces smooth pasta sheets more quickly. Unlike the manual roller, the automatic KitchenAid attachment affords you use of both hands for feeding and catching pasta sheets, which simplifies the task.

This attachment is a convenient way to add pasta-making gear to your kitchen if you already own a KitchenAid stand mixer. From start to finish, it cut our pasta-making time by a third compared with how long a hand-operated machine like the Marcato Atlas 150 Pasta Machine takes.

Since the KitchenAid attachment is automated, you can put all your focus towards feeding dough into the machine and making sure it comes out flat on the other side. It can also churn out sheets from tougher doughs with greater ease than if you were cranking it out by hand. The one disadvantage is that on the widest setting of the KitchenAid attachment, the rollers do not sit very far apart, which meant I had to pass the dough through several more times to get a smooth sheet than I did using the Atlas 150.

Like Marcato, KitchenAid also offers cutting attachments, which can be purchased separately in a set that includes both fettuccine and spaghetti. These cutters were able to slice through the dough cleanly, leaving only a few strands of fettuccine stuck together out of hundreds. They also work quickly, and, being suspended at the top of the mixer itself, gives you a lot more clearance between the cutters and the counter than the Atlas 150. This makes feeding longer sheets of dough and catching them as they come out easier.

The KitchenAid Pasta Roller did have one notable disadvantage. Because you can only put one attachment onto your mixer at once, it’s more difficult to switch between rolling and cutting than it is on a hand-crank machine. By comparison, switching between cutting on the Atlas 150 is as easy as moving the crank from the roller to the cutting attachment. I found that the best way to deal with this was to roll out a long sheet of dough and cut that into several shorter sheets before switching to the cutting attachments. This isn’t an ideal setup, especially if you have limited counter space. However, the time lost in this setup is made up by the speed of the machine.

This is an affordable, textured, solid-wood board that’s great for rolling out pasta shapes by hand (with some practice).

For about $10, the humble Eppicotispai Gnocchi Board is a refreshingly affordable tool for making pasta shapes by hand.

The small, ridged wooden board leaves grooves on little nuggets of dough to create gnocchi (video). Though at first glance the tool might seem easy to master, it takes some practice to figure out how to roll the dough at the correct angle and with the right amount of pressure to achieve the desired result. Once you get a feel for it, you’ll find the muscles in your thumbs know how to deftly roll out piece after piece with impressive speed and dexterity.

With another hour or so of practice with this board, I was able to add a series of other shapes to my repertoire, such as cavatelli and garganelli (video), a hand-rolled style of penne. But even with practice, rolling out every piece of pasta is always going to be more time-consuming than using a machine. Working at a decent clip, it took me two hours (about an episode and a half of Ken Burns’s The Civil War) to make enough pasta for eight to 10 people.

I’ve been using this affordable beechwood model from Eppicotispai for about five years, and I like the depth of its ridges and that it comes with a mini rolling pin (although a pencil also works in a pinch). However, the build and material of a gnocchi board is more important than the brand. When choosing one, make sure that the board is made from actual wood, not from bamboo or plastic, and that the wood is unfinished. Finished or varnished woods and bamboo are not able to grab onto the dough as well, nor can they absorb excess moisture from the dough, which helps keep pasta at the desired consistency.

You can also find higher-end, hand-carved cherry or walnut boards, sometimes known as cavarola boards, but simpler models work just as well.

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An easy-to-master machine capable of putting out fresh pasta faster than anything else.

Identical in almost every way to the CucinaPro model, this cavatelli maker is a little more expensive but a good option if our other pick is out of stock.

The cavatelli maker has a long history in the Italian-American kitchen, and for good reason. It’s perhaps the fastest and easiest way to make shaped pasta at home. I am a fan of the CucinaPro Cavatelli Homemade Pasta Maker, an inexpensive aluminum model that’s about $40 and requires zero learning curve to operate. It can make someone who has never stepped into a kitchen feel like a pasta master.

It’s hard to overstate just how easy this machine is to operate. Anyone who can turn a crank can use it, including young children (just make sure they don’t stick their fingers into the machine). A cavatelli maker can turn pasta-making into a low-stress family activity that ends with some excellent homemade pasta.

Even though it’s completely manual, a cavatelli maker is extremely fast. It can spit out pasta far more quickly than a manual roller like the Marcato Atlas 150 Pasta Machine. In about three hours—from the time I started weighing the ingredients for the dough to the moment I finished making the pasta—I had enough cavatelli to feed 15 people.

The build quality of the CucinaPro cavatelli maker leaves something to be desired. Its body shows scratches from regular use, and a screw that keeps the crank in place comes loose every so often. Even so, this machine functions as well after a few years of use and tens of thousands of cavatelli as it did when it was new.

To use the cavatelli maker, you need to roll out long coils of dough and feed them into the machine while turning the hand crank. The task is easier than passing sheets through a roller and cutter and can be done entirely by one person. It also makes a very pleasant mechanical clacking noise as you go. Because the cavatelli are only as uniform as the rope of dough you put through the machine, the result is delightfully uneven and handmade while still looking polished. The pasta produced by this machine also has a chew and a density that feels, paradoxically, light and airy at the same time.

With some patience, you can also flip every one of your cavatelli inside out by hand to make orecchiette.

Some of the all-time great pastas, such as rigatoni and bucatini, are produced using a method called extrusion, in which dough is pushed through a die to create a three-dimensional shape.

However, the home extruders we tried failed to impress. When testing KitchenAid attachments, we found that the KitchenAid Gourmet Pasta Press extruder felt cheap, was difficult to clean, and worked at an excruciatingly slow pace. The plastic body was flimsy—the one I ordered arrived with two large cracks and had to be replaced. I also worried that keeping a KitchenAid mixer running for the 30 to 45 minutes it took to push through enough pasta for four people might burn out the motor. The pasta itself was overworked and gummy, and the extruder didn’t deliver the level of quality that our picks did. Plus, none of the home extruders we know of have bronze dies, which is what gives that style of pasta its shaggy exterior and makes it so good at absorbing sauce.

Although we haven’t tested the popular models from Philips (specifically from the 7000 series and the Viva collection), their plastic bodies and the 150 W motors, roughly half the wattage of a standard KitchenAid stand mixer, hint at the potential for breakage and burnout. Its extruders are more expensive than any other pasta maker in this guide, with some models coming in at over $200. They’re also bulky, hard to store, and take up a lot of counter space.

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There is nothing wrong with dried pasta; drying has been used for centuries as a way of preserving pasta, and the vast majority of pasta consumed around the world—even in most restaurants—is dried. However, fresh pasta has a few discernable advantages over its boxed counterparts.

The first is the flavor and consistency of pasta that’s made at home. Even novices will find their pasta dishes significantly improved by fresh pasta. It can elevate the simplest Sunday sauce with a chew and a density that is almost impossible to achieve with boxed noodles. Fresh pasta has a starchiness that helps sauces and cheese emulsify around it, creating a cohesive symphony of flavor with relatively little effort. At times it feels like a cheat code, with the pasta alone doing 90% of the work.

Fresh pasta can also do things that dried pasta simply cannot. While most boxed pasta is made from semolina and water, making pasta from scratch allows you to make dough from eggs and all-purpose flour, opening a door to dishes and shapes that are traditionally found in Northern Italy, where egg-based pasta is more common. Working dough by hand also creates the opportunity to make varieties of pasta you might not even be able to find in specialty stores, like trofie (video), capunti, lorighittas (video), and literally hundreds of others. Making pasta also means you’re able to stuff ravioli and tortellini with any kind of filling you might want, far beyond what is typically available in stores.

The ease and accessibility of dried pasta is hard to overlook: It almost always takes less time to go to a grocery store to buy pasta and then cook it than it does to prepare pasta at home. But that too is part of the charm of making fresh pasta—that for an hour or two it allows you to slip away from the rhythms of daily life and exist in a meditative state, working with your hands, surrounded by flour and dough and silence.

This article was edited by Gabriella Gershenson and Catherine Kast.

Alexander Aciman

Alexander Aciman is an editor. He has worked as a journalist and on documentary film projects, and he has also worked as a screenwriter for Amazon and Lionsgate. When he’s not working, you can probably find him bird watching, running, or making pasta.

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