“Making pasta” is easy when you’re just cooking dried pre-made pasta and adding sauce and there’s nothing wrong with that. But even if you do try your hand at homemade pasta with a pasta maker and homemade pasta sauce it’s still not quite the same as pasta made entirely by hand. You can tell the difference that extra effort makes in the final product. And that’s not some metaphorical “love is the secret ingredient” idea: making pasta by hand will produce different noodles than making pasta by machine.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Tasty | 2019-07-21 15:00:09 |  912,936 Views |
Handmade vs. Machine Made Pasta and Meatballs • Tasty
In short rolling pasta dough with an old-fashioned rolling pin gives the pasta more texture and helps it absorb sauces better. The fact that a rolling pin lacks the precision of a machine actually works in its favor. Rolling by hand slowly flattens and thins the egg dough making it coarse and this coarse texture makes it easier for the sauce to mix into the pasta later. Meanwhile a machine—which can be anything from a large factory machine to a hand-held pasta maker with a crank handle—quickly flattens it and leaves it completely smooth.
That texture of handmade pasta is important: Often the difference between expensive spaghetti and cheap spaghetti is how much texture the noodles have. Cheap mass-produced pasta looks almost unnaturally smooth and sauces roll off it more easily. Virtually any sauce sticks better to rough chalky pasta. So hand-rolling can be a much cheaper way to get that kind of pasta than spending money on the expensive stuff (though it’s still not quite the same as the expensive store-bought kind unless you have bronze or brass pasta molds).
So is it still worth using a machine? It depends. If you want really thin pasta a pasta machine is easier than rolling by hand. While it’s easy to assume that a pasta machine is always faster it can take about the same amount of time to feed dough through the machine as it does to roll it with a pin. The trade-off is that the machine will definitely be less tiring than the elbow grease required to do it the old-fashioned way. For a smaller amount of pasta you might find that rolling by hand is worth it once the noodles are on your plate.
