Review on 🍝 Hamilton Beach Electric Pasta and Noodle Maker: Automatic, 7 Different Shapes - White (86650) by Ellie Parra

I love homemade pasta but have never tried it. For a lazy chef like me, that always seemed like a big problem. This car seemed right to me. It mixes, walks you through the measurements, and then extrudes (pushes) the dough through the selected disc for the specific paste desired. It seems like it should be a no-brainer (err...pasta?) but having already made three batches I can say it's pretty good, but it doesn't quite work like a dream. First of all, it really takes practice to make pasta the way you like it. This machine comes with two preset programs, including a "quick paste" setting that squeezes the noodles immediately after mixing is complete, and a regular pasta setting that takes a few minutes between mixing and squeezing. Guess faster isn't better so I used the regular pasta setting. The instructions are very detailed and mostly well illustrated. Here are some tips that will be helpful for a pasta making beginner like me. A few basic pasta recipes are offered. Make sure your ingredients are fresh. You can use any pasta recipe you like, you just need to separate the ingredients into two components - dry and liquid. It can be as simple as flour and water, or you can add other dry ingredients to the flour for flavor; and you can add eggs, olive oil, or other wet ingredients to the liquid mixture. The recipes provided suggest that for one pound of plain egg paste you will need 400 grams of the dry ingredient and 140 milliliters of the liquid (metric cups provided). But this is where it gets difficult... stay here with me. When using preset programs, you first enter the dry dough portion and then the machine tells you how many milliliters of liquid you need. This is not the amount listed in the recipe. For the first two batches, I filled the machine with 400 grams of flour mixture and the machine told me to add 114 milliliters of liquid. Pasta came out too dry. For my third batch, I ignored the machine's suggestion of 114 milliliters and added the full 140. The pasta came out a lot better in my opinion, but the machine had a little more trouble with the wetter dough. Some of the dough didn't make it into the extruder and I had to turn off the machine, manually move the dough a bit, restart the machine and press the extruder button to eject the rest of the pasta. That is hard. get used to how the dough looks when kneaded. It looks too dry, but should be "damp and crumbly." Then, when it passes through the extruder, it magically turns into noodles. The instruction manual has pictures illustrating what the dough should look like, but I can't say I found them as helpful as the text describing what the texture of the dough should be like. As I mentioned above, I find I get the best results when the dough is a bit wetter. As such, you may need to figure out how you want your dough to look when kneaded. The machine does not use all of the dough, especially if you are following the programmed liquid amount settings. The extruder function will eventually turn off and stop no matter how much dough has been ejected. The first few times I used this machine there was a lot of dough left and I had to restart the machine and press the extruder button. On my third batch, I found that when the dough was wetter, it got used more, although I did have to add some more extrusion time at the end. Also, it doesn't do well with less dough. However, you can make a large batch and refrigerate or freeze pasta that you don't need to cook right away. Cleaning is a difficult task. With so much dough stuck to different parts of the machine, it's difficult to take it apart for washing. I submerged the entire mixer together and let it soak before separating the parts for individual cleaning. While this must sound like a very negative review - I'd give it 3.5 stars if I had the chance - the car has turned out pretty well. good noodle. You'll have to play around with it a bit to get the paste exactly how you want it, and that may mean ignoring instructions here and there. My third batch came out pretty good and I look forward to working on my pasta protocol in future batches.