"Blair P. Houghton" > wrote in message
ups.com...
> Oh yeah.
>
> That worked.
>
> It was a bit fiddly with the fettucini plate. The noodles were
> paper-thin at first, and wanted to scrunch up, but I took the advice of
> the book and kept feeding it back until about 10 inches had come out,
> then it began to flow better. Then the problem became separating about
> 16 wide, flat noodles before they could stick together again. I ended
> up making about 8-inch pieces and feeding a quarter to a half of them
> back continuously. Eventually I ended up with 3 ounces of usable
> noodles and about 3 ounces of spare dough.
>
> 3 ounces is a reasonable serving for a person who's not trying to gain
> weight, so I figured that was as good a place to stop as any.
>
> One good thing about pasta dough: it's practically self-cleaning. It
> releases from the crannies of the grinder with minimal swipe of a
> finger. I can't imagine how ugly cleanup is going to be after I pass a
> pound of fatty pork through the thing, though...
>
> I had planned to just try out the machine, get a feel for the process,
> learn a few things, and put the noodles in the fridge for the night,
> but after I got a look at them you know there was no way.
>
> I dumped an inch and a half of water into a pot, tossed in a fat pinch
> of salt, whacked the knob up to HI, and got out the parm-reg and
> penzey's italian herbs and extra-virgin olive oil. Barely 60 seconds
> of boiling later, I combined and plated, then forked and faced.
>
> Dee-lish.
>
> As expected, the bleached AP wheat flour made for a bland, if
> wonderfully textured, pasta. A half-grind of black pepper punched it
> up a little. Tomorrow I'll be shopping for 00 durum semolina.
>
> --Blair
>

With the pasta plates, the dough has to be a lot dryer than I thought was
normal, but if it's too wet, you get a lot of sticking. If it's dry enough,
the strands separate well enough. And we're talking differences of a
half-teaspoon here. It's pretty darned finicky. But it's fun and one of
these days I'm going to try the hollow noodle plate and see how that goes.

If you really get into pasta-making mode, they've also got the roller gizmo
that's pretty slick. I've got an old hand-crank model, but cranking that
thing can get old pretty fast, not to mention that you sort of need 3
hands -- one to crank, one to feed the dough, and one to catch it. With the
kitchenaid thing, you feed with one hand, catch with the other, and it's
fast and easy. And you can use wetter doughs, and fiddle with the recipes a
lot more, because it's more forgiving than the extruder. The set I got came
with the roller and some cutters -- I think 3.

There's also a ravioli thing, but after I read the reviews, I didn't buy it.
It's a manual crank unit that you attach to the kitchenaid, which seems kind
of silly. When I made ravioli a month or so ago, I used the Kitchenaid to
make the dough and roll the sheets, and I used the old hand-crank unit for
making the ravioli. That way I could go right from making sheets to filling
the ravioli.

Of course, you could make the ravioli by hand, too.

Geez, now I'm thinking about noodles...

Donna