What?
The John Lewis pasta machine costs £32 and features steel rollers mounted to clamped base. The rollers are width-adjustable by gradation and used to sequentially flatten flour and egg mixture.
Why?
You can get fasta pasta, but can you boast about it, dough?
Well?
OK, I’m going to try to write about making pasta without resorting to Dolmio-advert stereotypes that make every Italian person sound like the Super Mario Bros. (“We make-a da pasta, but first we make-a da love! Mamma mia!” That sort of thing.) Although the recipe has only two ingredients, this process contains high levels of smuggery, more than any other food handshaped from dough. To paraphrase Louis Armstrong, “I see friends at dinner parties, saying ‘I make my own pasta’/ They’re really saying: ‘So screw you.’”
Like other pasta machines, this John Lewis number is basically a lasagne mangle. You feed egg and flour dough through eight narrowing settings, each pass yielding a more delicate sheet. You can then send it through the tagliatelle or fettuccine roller-blades, slicing it in long strands. You will need: one hand to feed the pasta from above, one hand to draw it out so it doesn’t clump beneath the rollers, and one hand to turn the handle. My prehensile tail came in useful here, but other upright tetrapods may struggle.
A bigger problem is the dough itself, which grows immense and translucent, while remaining stickier than Winnie the Pooh’s credit rating. It’s like doing origami with fly paper. Any unattended sheets of dough quickly harden, until they resemble a pair of Nora Batty’s tights left out on the line. It’s maddening. How can this work? Unbelievably, hours of persistence are eventually rewarded with some beauteous, non-disintegrating pasta. Seeing that perfect sheet streaming into ribbons of yellow, all improbability is redeemed; as if I’m handling Faith itself, built on fragile dreams. But let’s not stretch the metaphor thinner than the pasta. My resulting bowl of fresh fettuccine, parmesan, pepper and olive oil is world-beatingly good. Worth the absurd number of hours invested? Well, in for a penne, in for a pound; I had to pasta time somehow. I spent it mainly thinking up puns, which you may not thank me for. As the Italians might say: “Basta pasta.”
Redeeming features?
It’s nice pretending to be an Italian grandmother. There’s nothing weird about that. Maybe it’s you that’s weird.
Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?
Counter. It cannoli get easier. 3/5
