Interested in making fresh pasta at home? Congratulations, it’s one of the most fun, rewarding projects you can do in the kitchen. It’s can be something you do now and then, or it can be a long-time journey as you grow from an occasional pasta-maker to a serious sfolino (which is Italian for a pasta maker of course).
You could do all this with a manual or automatic pasta maker, but this article will focus on the hand tools you’ll need (or want) to make top quality fresh pasta at home.
Simple Pasta Maker Setup
If you are just getting into making pasta at home, you might not need any tools at all as all the equipment is stuff you probably already have.
- Chef’s knife
- Digital kitchen scale
- Cutting board
- Rolling pin
- Pot
Pasta dough is, of course, very simple in theory. You mix flour and water, perhaps some egg, and you roll it flat and cut it. No special tools are required to make simple pasts shapes, like papardelle, farfalle, or garganelli.
Once the dough is formed — usually on an extra large cutting board but you could use a mixing bowl as well — you’ll need to roll it out and then form it.
The forming with simple pastas is usually done with a knife, but it could also be done with simple, affordable pasta making implements like a gnocchi board, a rolling ravioli cutter, or any number of other simple tools. These things are all super fun, but none are necessary for making basic pastas as most simple shapes can be done with your hand, the back of a spoon, a butter knife, or your chef’s knife for flat shapes .
Advanced Setup
If you are getting more serious about your pasta making, you want to piecemeal upgrade your equipment, or you want to make a gift then you might want to consider some (or all) of these…
- Mattarello (very long rolling pin with no taper on the sides)
- Very large cutting board (tagliere in Italian)
- Microplane
- 8-quart sauce pot
- Frying spider or sieve
- Dough scraper
- 5-wheel pastry cutter
- Pepper mill
Some of these things you might have in some form, like the sauce pot, but you’ll likely need a larger one for making pasta than you might already have. The same goes for the cutting board and the rolling pin.
Other gear, like the spider and pepper mill are things you might upgrade for expertly making pasta but they are multi-use so you don’t need to feel bad about buying single-use tools!