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I’ve been on a kick that has me ordering As Seen On TV stuff I wanted when I was a kid. I bought an unopened (((Ron Popeil))) automatic pasta maker. I have no pasta making experience.

It seems the basic recipe is water, egg, oil, and flour. I see that “00” flour is preferred over all-purpose. I watched the instructional video and infomercial, both gave some ideas.

Spinach is something I’m going to experiment with. But surely you folks have some knowledge and experience. Let me know.

I’ve been on a kick that has me ordering As Seen On TV stuff I wanted when I was a kid. I bought an unopened (((Ron Popeil))) automatic pasta maker. I have no pasta making experience. It seems the basic recipe is water, egg, oil, and flour. I see that “00” flour is preferred over all-purpose. I watched the instructional video and infomercial, both gave some ideas. Spinach is something I’m going to experiment with. But surely you folks have some knowledge and experience. Let me know.

(post is archived)

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I got my wife a Kitchen Aid with the pasta attachments. They're made of all metal, and she loves them. I don't know any of her recipes, but she thinks the machine will last for the rest of our lives, and she has fun using it.

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Metal would be nice. Part of this was for nostalgia. A large part. But I’d still like to get some pasta out of it.

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I used to have a (((Ron Popeil))) pasta maker machine about 25 years ago. It was fun for a while, but it was difficult to get the pasta dough to the proper hydration level to extrude into shapes properly. The amount of force needed to push the dough through the extruder and dies is quite high and the machine will pay the price for it after a few dozen uses. The motor is strong enough to hanfdle the job, but the polycarbonate housing of the extruder section will start cracking from the pressure until it eventually fails completely and break off rendering the machine useless.

I recommend letting the dough rest and hydrate more between the initial mix and extrusion. It will require a little more water for the initial mix, but finding how much to add and how to let it rest will take experimentation, especially if you make egg pasta. I also recommend adding a little salt to the dough in the initial mix to keep your pasta from tasting too much of raw flour. I also tried letting the fresh pasta dry out over several days, but you will never end up with anything close to commercial dried pasta. I later learned that making dried pasta is a major challenge and not really possible to do at home without specialized equipment that is too expensive and large for home use.

Have fun with it while it still works. It is nice to have it do most of the hard work so it can also be used to start your pasta dough that you finish by hand after the extruder housing breaks off. My unit also claimed to make sausage, but I never tried that before it broke.

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Thanks for all the info. I’ve opened it, cleaned everything, and assembled. Immediately, the plastic (the clear parts) definitely remind me of every piece of plastic like that cracking. Definite concern.

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I just recieved mine, I'm interested in ideas also!

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Haha. That’s awesome. I’m about to make my first batch with the basics. Fingers crossed!

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I hope it comes out great!

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Did not. But it was edible. I think the dough needs to be way more dry.

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My friend in Christ, why?

JK. Idk, I've never made pasta from scratch. If you wanted, you could put herbs, like dried basil, in the oil. I would gently warm the oil, strain and let it come back to room temp before use.

Good luck with your new hobby!

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I watched the infomercial and my first thought was that the machine will break quickly and the results don't look good. Afaik the dough for these kind of machines is supposed to be crumbly and you only get it to be crumbly if you pour in the liquid drop wise. Instead for a beginning, you could take a good thick whisk, mix up flour, egg and salt so it barely is whisk-able, cook some water with salt, lower the temperature to simmer, pour some of that dough on a wooden plate and scrape thin noodles right into the water. Do some and take them out right into cold water and continue until you have the amount you need. If the water is cooking too strong or sth is wrong with the dough, the noodles will fall apart and can be fed to the pigs. They taste great heated up in butter and salt only but there are at least 6 million different sauces

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This was my error in my first run last night. I followed the recipe exactly as they instructed, but extrusion was a failure. My diagnosis was the dough was way too wet/sticky. I added more flour and it started coming out but I was annoyed so I shut it down. I scraped out the stuck dough then did pretty much exactly what you just said. Made a ball. Flattened (just with my hand), cut strips and cooked them. I had Parmesan and butter in a pan. Tossed the noodles around in there and it was good enough. What I harvested from the pasta maker was comical but edible as well. I took some pics.

I think the key is super dry dough for the machine. I’ll find out soon.

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Out of curiosity I watched a review from 5 years ago where the pasta turned out great. There's a part of the extruder that had to be heated up in hot water before being screwed on. You did that as well I suppose?

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I was on the fence about it. It didn’t need to be heated up to fit. So there’s debate I’ve seen that the hot disc would mess up the pasta coming out by heating it up a bit. Some said it’s to help the pasta go through the disc and they recommended just putting a little oil in there (lady host in infomercial even says that but Ron says something like “we are already using oil). I went the oil route. But I’ll say, the issue with it not extruding was the dough was super stuck in the back and not moving forward. Adding more flour helped. I also learned the machine was designed to be tipped forward off need be. That would probably help too.

I’m optimistic it’ll turn out better after more trial and error.

I also forgot how cheap it is to make things with flour. I used to have an all-in-one bread maker/baker but the belt inside broke. I broke it even more trying to get it open to fix it.

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Does it just press out classic pasta or can it make pasta sheets? You could make pierogi that way.

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It uses disks with different shapes like play doh.