I love infomercials. However, I never buy the products because they are usually too good to be true. I did buy a Traeger smoker after seeing an infomercial on it and that's how I ended up here. A week ago, I saw an infomercial on a Chef Emeril pasta maker and was amazed how quickly it made fresh pasta. My wife and I made fresh pasta when were in grad school but it was a hassle. This Emeril machine made it look so easy. I did a little research and found Emeril's machine appears to be a knockoff of one made by Philips. The Philips has been around for years and appeared to be well constructed. I ended up buying the Philips off of Costco.com for $250. It comes with eight pasta dies.
The Philips machine has a huge number of YouTube videos on it's operation. It has gone over several iterations over the years and the controls vary a bit between different revisions. The one preparation item I took away from the YouTube videos was that the flour should be measured by weight and not by volume. I made my first batch of fettucine with 200g of semola flour and 50g of all purpose flour. It took less than 15 minutes to make 13 ounces of pasta. My wife was impressed with the quality of the pasta and had some for lunch with pesto sauce. We made another batch for dinner following a Rachel Ray linguini and clams recipe. Cleanup of the machine again was a breeze following a recommendation from a YouTube video. The video suggested leaving the machine parts sit around for a couple of hours and the dried pasta would flake off easily. The method worked well.
Has anyone else tried one these machines?