Best Pasta Makers (2024), Tested and Reviewed

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.

CucinaPro Pasta Maker

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.

Anolon Pasta Maker

The Anolon Pasta Maker has 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.

Cuisinart Pastafecto

The Cuisinart Pastafecto worked without incident; it’s just not as heavy-duty a machine as the Philips 7000. 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.

Hamilton Beach Electric Pasta and Noodle Maker

This pasta maker comes with some very nice features, including 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. The manual suggests scissors, which 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 the Hamilton Beach Electric Pasta and Noodle Maker 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.

KitchenAid Pasta Press Attachment

Given how well the roller attachment worked, we had high expectations for this extruder pasta maker attachment. However, the need to constantly feed walnut-size pieces of dough into the machine lost it major convenience points compared 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 (so it doesn’t gum up the die), 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.

Do I need a pasta maker to make pasta?

The act of pasta making predates any pasta-making machine, and we certainly 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, however, is ease of use, convenience, consistency, and uniformly even sheets to use when making lasagna, ravioli, penne, angel hair, and noodles of all kinds.

Is fresh pasta always better?

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 make a simple 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.