Sales Rank: 405


Features:

Easy-to-use hand-cranked machine creates a variety of homemade pasta

Sturdy clamp safely steadies the machine against a tabletop or counter

Comes with cutters for spaghetti (2 mm, round) and fettuccine (6-1/2 mm, flat)

Includes easy-to-follow directions and recipes to get your started

heavyweight chromed steel construction; made in Italy

Average Rating:
Rating: - simple elegance
Looking for an easy way to impress friends a relatives? Homemade pasta fits the bill. Delicious, nutritious, and best of all easy, pasta is a staple of many cuisines around the world for good reason. I have personally found the manual pasta makers to work more consistantly than automatic one, plus they are a lot more fun! anyone who enjoyed Play-doh as a kid will love cranking out their own pasta with this easy to use appliance. A must for any gourmet.

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Rating: - Fun Kitchen tool, but design could be improved
I just received this pasta machine as a belated birthday gift from my in laws, and had a fun day trying it out for the first time this past weekend. After some initial work getting the machine all cleaned up and ready for use (read the instructions--you need to waste some pasta dough before the machine will be clean enough for making food) I was at it. The machine worked great for rolling out thin sheets of pasta, but somewhat less well for cutting the pasta. I learned after a few failed attempts to cut my sheets into fettucini that my cutter attachment had a manufacturing error--a spring in the mechanism was set incorrectly. I went in and fixed the spring and then the cutter worked fine. Really, once you have the sheets if you really want linguini or fettucini, it's probably just as easy (or easier) to lay the sheets on a cutting board and cut the thin strips out with a knife. The real problems came after I used the machine. This is not all that easy to clean. If you get pasta dough in the rollor mechanism it can be pretty difficult to get it out, the cutters can be even worse. Once I finnaly got it clean I left it in my dish rack to dry (don't do this) and found out later that the rollers had started to rust. It seems to me that The manufacturer could have easily made the entire machine out of a better quality stainless steel that would be less likely to start rusting so quickly. Anyway, I've learned my lesson, I cleaned up the rust, applied a little olive oil to the rollers to prevent them from rusting again, and next time I'll make sure to dry the machine thouroughly before walking away. In all it's a great machine for rolling ouyt pasta, and I'm sure I'll continue to use it and enjoy it, but it could be easier to take care of.

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Rating: - Fresh pasta is irresistible
What is more digestible and appetizing than a plate of fresh pasta lightly dressed with a fresh sauce, or just olive oil and parmesan? If you want to make pasta, this is a good device. Just some helpful hints for using the Villaware.

1. The thin noodle (tagliatellini) attachment will produce spaghetti-like thin noodles. But you need to dry the pasta sheets somewhat before you cut them. Otherwise they stick together and you will be saying nasty words in your kitchen.

2. You don't wash this thing. Flour and water equals paste and cement. So resist this bad idea. Just brush the thing out with a stiff pastry brush.

3. The pasta dough is best left to rest for 20 minutes, at least, under a damp tea towel. This allows the gluten in the flour to relax enough for you to roll it out. If you are impatient and neglect this step, you may think the pasta maker is having a tough time rolling the dough, but it is not--you have to allow the dough time to relax.

4. You go through the thickness settings from widest to narrowest, rolling out the dough and folding it into thirds, then re-rolling. If the dough piece gets unwieldy and way too long, just cut it in half, then process the halves separately. It means shorter noodles, but a lot easier handling for you.

5. Unless you really insist, you don't have to use semolina flour. In fact, this flour is often grainy and produces a less smooth result at home. I use bread flour. It's fine. And if you don't want egg yolk, just add egg whites, or those imitation eggs that are mostly egg white. Works fine.

6. If you want spinach or carrot or beet pasta, you can buy powdered vegetables that have been freeze-dried and sprayed to a fine consistency. This is an easy way to add color and flavor, without having to squeeze out pots of spinach into a nasty mess. Commercial cooking catalogs from baking and gourmet supply companies often sell these powders.

7. The home-made pasta is brittle, so really, making extra and storing it is less successful than making it fresh. The Villageware machine is so easy to use, however, once you get the knack, that you may find, as I do, that it is easier just to whip up a fresh batch than to try to process extra and store it.

ONE more hint--and it's why this is four and not five stars: the clamp has about a 2 to 2.5 inch clearance to attach to your counter. Your counters may be quite a bit thicker. So it can be hard to figure out where to mount the machine. Sometimes a kitchen table will do instead of the kitchen counter. Or you can drill a cut out under the lip of the counter for the clamp. If you are clever, it won't be visible.