To revisit this recipe, visit My Account, then View saved recipes.
To revisit this recipe, visit My Account, then View saved recipes Small Egg Tray Machine
By Wilder Davies and Noah Kaufman
All products featured on Epicurious are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Making fresh pasta isn’t as easy as cooking a box of dried fettuccine or tagliatelle from your pantry, but there’s a reason many home cooks go for the homemade pasta merit badge: Those freshly rolled strands are rich and tender, springy, and, frankly, impressive.
Now, the act of pasta making predates all these machines. So we won’t claim you actually need the best pasta maker from these tests to make it. The low-tech option of making fresh pasta with just a rolling pin and a knife absolutely works. What pasta makers offer is consistency and uniformly even sheets to use when making lasagna, ravioli, and noodles of all kinds.
Unfortunately, searching for the best pasta makers online will lead you down a rabbit hole of sketchy Amazon listings and into a world of poorly manufactured copycats. Which is why we are here to make sure that the pasta maker that ends up on your countertop will keep you in unadulterated pasta-making bliss.
We tested several types of pasta makers, including manual and electric pasta makers, rollers and pasta extruders. To find a machine that produced great results and was easy to use, read on for the results. For details of how we tested, scroll to the bottom of the page.
The best pasta maker overall The best manual pasta maker The best electric pasta extruder How we tested Other electric pasta extruders we tested Other manual pasta makers we tested Is fresh pasta always better? The takeaway
We need to set this up with the caveat that this pasta roller is a KitchenAid attachment, and will only work if you own a KitchenAid stand mixer. But even so, we feel strongly that this is the best pasta maker to recommend for a couple of reasons. First, a stand mixer is a more basic kitchen tool than a pasta maker, so it is likely that, if you are in the market for a pasta maker, you are the kind of person who already owns a stand mixer. Second, since a pasta maker is not the sort of thing most home cooks use every day, having something that is convenient to store is very important and, because it is an attachment, it is smaller than the stand-alone pasta makers. Third, it’s the most affordable way to get an electric pasta machine in your life—and the ease that comes with an electric pasta maker compared to a manual one is as close to life-changing as buying a pasta maker can be.
The KitchenAid is a heavy-duty roller with eight thickness settings. It handled thicker slabs of dough on the widest setting without issue. We certainly heard the mixer straining some under the effort, but it never jammed or stalled. Because it has no crank, it’s easy to feed dough through the roller with two hands—a huge help in keeping it moving through straight. Compared to manually cranking pasta, the experience of using the KitchenAid roller is downright pleasant. Even a total pasta beginner will be encouraged by the noodles they’re able to make.
The roller is also available as part of a three-piece set, which comes with cutters for spaghetti and fettuccine, and as part of a five-piece set that comes with additional cutters for lasagnette and capellini. Choosing to get the cutters removes some of the storage convenience, but they all work well. If you don’t want to hand-cut your noodles they’re good pickups.
As with any pasta maker, cleaning the KitchenAid Pasta Roller is challenging. Pieces of dough will almost certainly get stuck between the rollers at some point. But if you wait for the most challenging little bits of dough to dry you can get them off with a stiff-bristled brush and/or a bamboo skewer.
KitchenAid 3-Piece Pasta Roller Attachment Set
Weight: 2.4 lbs. Dimensions: 9.7 x 3.8 x 2.2 inches Materials: Stainless steel Warranty: 1 year warranty
Italian-made Marcato machines are well-known in the pasta maker world, and the company’s classic model, the Marcato Atlas 150, comes in weighty chrome-plated steel. The Italian machine attaches to a countertop with a screw clamp and comes with a hand crank and additional pasta cutter attachments. While it’s best to use the clamp if you can, the Marcato is heavy enough to be used without it in a pinch. Like all the manual machines we 3, the hand crank detaches so you can move it between the different cutting and rolling attachments. But unlike the other machines, the attachments on the Marcato slid into place with ease.
Pasta machines will often jam if you put them under a large amount of stress by using dough that’s too thick. But of the machines we tried, the Marcato Atlas 150 was the most capable of handling thick slabs of dough. It offers 10 different thickness settings, which are marked from 0 (the widest at 4.8 mm) to 9 (the thinnest at 0.6 mm). The settings provide a natural progression for rolling out increasingly thin sheets of dough without jamming or clogging the machine. Of all of the machines we tested, the Marcato was also the most resistant to jams when thick sheets of dough were incorrectly fed through narrower settings.
The additional attachments that came with the Marcato Atlas 150 included a cutter attachment for fettuccine and tagliolini, which slide into place on the top of the main rolling mechanism. We tested it with both high and low hydration doughs to see how the machine handled doughs that were sticky and doughs that were tough and firm. We found that the cutter couldn’t slice the strands all the way through at a higher hydration level, but did so without issue at a lower hydration level. To be fair, properly made pasta dough shouldn’t be sticky, but we were interested in testing the limits of the machine. The Marcato instruction manual provides helpful information on how to fix your dough should your noodles stick.
On that note, unlike several of the other machines we tested, the Marcato Atlas 150 arrived with a thorough instruction manual included. As trivial as it may seem, having comprehensive instructions can make the difference between perfect pasta or a flop.
If you're looking to go beyond lasagna and long noodles, you can purchase a compatible 12-piece cutter attachment set, which includes cutters for making mafaldine, pappardelle, vermicelli, ravioli, and more pasta shapes.
As we said of the KitchenAid: Pasta maker machines are not easy to clean, and that’s mostly true of the Marcato. While some of the other machines we tried were rinsable under water, they still require you to dry their many nooks and crannies immediately. The Marcato did come with clear instructions for removing the pin from the bottom of the extruders for cleaning, which we found surprisingly easy and fast. The best way to clean the machine is by using a small brush and a soft rag to clear out bits of dough between the threads of the extruder. Since you shouldn’t wash it with soap and water (it will rust), we suggest using oil-absorbent paper for cleaning if the machine gets a little greasy.
Weight: 5.4 lbs. Dimensions: 8 x 8 x 7 inches Materials: Stainless steel and aluminum Warranty: 2 year limited warranty
Unless you get a pasta extruder, a whole range of pasta shapes are just off limits to you. Think: bucatini, rigatoni, or fusilli. Extruders work by using an auger to force pasta dough through the holes in a die—a sort of mold for the noodles. If you have not seen it, the whole process, as Epi senior staff writer Emily Farris noted, looks like one of those Play-Doh factories you might have used when you were a kid. None of the gadgets we tested here were perfect, but all home pasta extruders will come with some limitations (professional pasta extruders, which are more stoutly made, can cost thousands of dollars). Of everything we tested, the Philips hit the mark most frequently.
The Philips pasta maker was a heavier piece of equipment than the other countertop pasta makers and mixed dough automatically. Simply add flour to the mixing bowl, put on the lid, hit start, and slowly pour your liquid through the holes in the top. It has a countdown clock on the display, which is a big plus. It let us know when we needed to have everything set up to cut and catch the noodles—the extrusion process demands constant cutting until all the dough has passed through the die.
While it doesn’t come with an attached cutter, the included plastic cutter did a surprisingly efficient job portioning out the pasta both in the spaghetti test and in the tube noodle test.
Spaghetti noodles came out fairly evenly and had plenty of structure that made them easy to move or hang without breaking. We did figure out a useful strategy halfway through testing: Use a pair of scissors for the first spaghetti cut about two inches away from the machine. Noodles extrude through the center of the die more quickly than around the edges. But if you make that first cut away from machine you will cut the noodles in the middle but not the ones on the edge, giving those edge noodles time to catch up. That will ensure even spaghetti through the whole process.
In our tube noodle test the Philips was untouchable. Almost all of the penne noodles came out sealed, which didn’t happen with any of the other extruders, that put out a lot of broken pasta.
Cleaning was actually quite easy (cleaning home extruders is generally easier than cleaning rollers). Many of the pieces are dishwasher-safe on the top rack. For the pasta discs themselves, simply wait for any stuck dough to dry and then poke it out with the included cleaning tool.
It would have been nice if it came with more than four pasta dies, especially because three of those dies (spaghetti, fettuccine, and lasagna) are noodle shapes that you can get with a more compact roller and cutter. There are a number of other shapes available for purchase separately online, but we would have preferred something like lasagne get replaced with a harder-to-make shape, like orchiette. Also, as we noted, this is a heavy kitchen appliance. That bodes well for durability, but it is harder to move around the counter or into a cabinet.
Weight: 15.1 lbs. Dimensions: 12.4 x 13.5 x 8.5 inches Materials: Plastic Warranty: 2 year warranty
For roller pasta machines, we tested each model using a variety of fresh pasta recipes with varying consistencies. We tested low- and high-moisture egg-enriched pasta doughs, an eggless semolina pasta dough, and a thick, seeded cracker dough. We ran the dough through each machine using the full range of thickness settings. We also ran un-flattened dough through the second or third setting as opposed to the largest setting to see how well the machine handled jams. We then took the sheets of pasta dough and tested the spaghetti cutter and the linguine or fettuccine cutter provided with each pasta machine. We used both the low- and high-moisture doughs to see how each pasta machine handled softer doughs, taking note of whether the extruded noodles stuck together or not.
After that, we hand-washed each machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions and paid attention to the overall build of each machine. Since pasta makers are prone to rusting, we used a dry cloth and a cleaning brush to clean away smudges and bits of dough.
For electric extruders, we did tests of spaghetti and tube noodles (the precise shape varied by machine) with two different dough recipes: One that came with the machine to test how it worked using its own recommendations, the other, the extruder dough recipe from Missy Robbins excellent 2021 book Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy’s Greatest Food. When we were done, we disassembled each pasta maker and cleaned it according to its instructions.
Given how well the roller attachment worked, we had high expectations for this additional pasta maker attachment. However, the need to constantly feed walnut-size pieces of dough into the machine lost it major convenience points to the auto mixing appliances. And while it had a great attached cutter, too many of the noodles in the tube pasta test came out split. One thing we did notice, though, was that it worked better with more heavily kneaded dough. Most extruder dough is quite crumbly, especially compared to dough for hand-shaped pasta. But we happened to have some extra dough from one of the other extruder tests that had been thoroughly kneaded by the machine, and when we ran it through the KitchenAid, we got the best spaghetti results of any extruder.
KitchenAid Gourmet Pasta Press Attachment
This pasta maker comes with a number of very nice features, like a built-in scale for weighing flour, a countdown timer, an extra-large mixing bowl for bigger batches, and a longer automatic pasta setting that allows time for the dough to rest in between kneading and extruding. It doesn’t, however, come with a cutting tool of any kind and suggests using scissors. As it turns out, scissors are excellent for cutting long noodles like spaghetti or fettuccine, but cannot cut short pasta like macaroni effectively—at least not from this machine. The real problem, though, was that it stalled out three times during testing—twice with the machine’s recommended dough recipe and once with Missy Robbins’s dough recipe. It kept giving an error that the lid was not attached, even when it was. The fix was to apply lots of pressure when reattaching.
Hamilton Beach Electric Pasta Maker & Noodle Machine with 7 Molds for Spaghetti & Fettucine and More, Makes 2-3 Servings in 15 Minutes, White (86650)
The Cuisinart worked without incident; it’s just not as heavy-duty a machine as the Philips. The tube pasta test also resulted in a lot of split noodles. But it’s easy to use and, if you’re into this sort of thing, it doubles as a bread machine. It also comes with the best selection of shapes including fusilli, rigatoni, and bucatini.
Cuisinart Pastafecto Bread, Pasta & Dough Maker
Here’s the thing about manual pasta machines: They are all quite similar. Pretty much all the machines operate via the same hand crank, clamped countertop design. The differences between the machines ultimately came down to small yet important details.
The Imperia is the Marcato’s closest competition in terms of quality. The machine itself is a sturdy stainless steel, and the crank has an attractive wooden handle. However, the Imperia didn’t fare as well as during testing. It handled dough made with 00 flour without issue, but it jammed up on the widest setting during the preliminary roll of a sheet of all-purpose (AP) flour pasta dough. In the U.S. AP flour is much easier to find than 00 flour, the go-to in Italy for making pasta dough. 00 flour, more finely milled and lower in protein, produces a pasta dough that’s pliant and easy to stretch. Pasta dough made with AP flour forms a stronger and resists stretching, requiring more force to roll it out. Since Americans are more likely to use AP flour when making pasta, we feel it makes more sense to recommend a machine that can handle that task with ease.
The Isler performed on par with the Marcato Atlas 150 in a number of important ways: Its roller operates smoothly and feeds dough, even thick slabs, through comparatively well. Its fettuccine and tagliolini attachments work pretty smoothly, cranking out pasta strands without jamming. However, the noodles did tend to stick to the machine a bit more. One reason to pick the Isiler: It’s roughly half the cost of the Marcato Atlas 150.
Unfortunately, the lower price correlates with a sacrifice in material quality: The Isiler is made of lighter and cheaper aluminum, which means you need to use the clamp attachment to keep it from lifting up and wobbling around. There is an advantage to aluminum, though: It can be washed with water. However, we found that using water didn’t really make the process of cleaning all the nooks and crannies that much easier. On the machine we tried, the numbers on the dial that controls the thickness settings did not line up with the pin, so it was difficult to tell which setting was actually selected. Unlike the Marcato, the Isiler lacks an extensive library of attachments for making different shapes.
The hand crank and pasta roller in this model had a habit of jamming on the widest setting, even when we weren’t feeding anything through. It also made a sound like a rickety wooden roller coaster when in use.
The Anolon had only seven thickness settings and was unable to roll out the low hydration dough or the cracker dough, even when we flattened it out by hand before running it through the machine.
Anolon Gourmet Prep Chrome Plated Pasta Maker
This is a loaded question, of course, and the answer isn’t as simple as yes or no. Fresh pasta is incredible in many dishes, and when prepared properly, can really elevate a conventional pasta dish, like cacio e pepe, into something truly exquisite. There’s also nothing like quite like homemade ravioli or other styles of stuffed pasta. If you are in the market for a pasta maker, chances are you already have an opinion on this yourself.
That being said, there are times when dried pasta makes more sense. Dried noodles hold up better in baked pasta dishes like lasagna and ziti. Achieving that al dente texture with fresh made pasta is not possible, so people with preferences toward a firmer pasta may find it softer than they are familiar with. This also means fresh pasta is not ideal for pasta salads, which also benefit from a firmer dried noodle.
Of course, you can always dry your own fresh pasta, but keep in mind that this should only be done with pasta bianca, or pasta without any egg in it, otherwise it will spoil.
If you have a KitchenAid stand mixer, the KitchenAid pasta roller is our top pick for the best pasta maker in terms of ease of use and consistent results. If you’re an eager home noodle maker who wants a high-quality, heavy-duty machine for making your own pasta, and you’re interested in having access to a versatile range of pasta attachments for making different types of pasta, the Marcato Atlas 150 is the best option for you. And if you want to get into making your own rigatoni, macaroni, we recommend the Philips Avance pasta extruder.
Tissue Paper Packing Machine © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Epicurious may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices