PHILIPSKitchen Appliances Compact Pasta and Noodle Maker, Viva Collection, Comes with 3 Default Classic Pasta Shaping Discs, Fully Automatic, Recipe Book, Small, Black (HR2371/05)

If you’ve always wanted to make fresh pasta at home but couldn’t be bothered with all the mess and effort, the Philips Compact Pasta and Noodle Maker might just be your new best friend. This fully automatic machine is designed to quickly prepare your favorite pasta and noodles with minimal effort. It comes with three classic shaping discs (Spaghetti, Penne, and Fettuccine), so you can make a variety of delicious pasta dishes in no time.Pros:1. Fully Automatic: You don’t have to be a pasta pro to make restaurant-quality dishes with this machine. Just add ingredients, press a button, and let the machine do the work. It’s as easy as it gets.2. Three Shaping Discs: The included shaping discs (Spaghetti, Penne, and Fettuccine) allow for a variety of pasta options, so you can mix things up based on your mood.3. Compact Design: It’s small enough to fit on most countertops without taking up too much space. Perfect for people with smaller kitchens or those who don’t want to clutter up their space with a big machine.4. Recipe Book Included: The included recipe book gives you a range of pasta options to try out, so you can get creative with your dishes.5. Easy to Clean: After making your pasta, the cleaning process is a breeze. The parts are detachable and dishwasher-safe, so no fuss or mess.Cons:1. Limited Shape Options: While the three discs are great for classic pasta shapes, more adventurous home chefs might find the lack of additional discs limiting.2. Requires Ingredients in the Right Proportions: While the machine is automatic, it works best when you use the right proportions of ingredients. If you’re unfamiliar with pasta-making, you might need to experiment a bit to get the perfect texture.3. May not be Best for Those with Special Dietary Needs: While this machine works wonders with traditional ingredients, if you need gluten-free, low-carb, or other specialty pastas, you may need to look for a machine that can handle these ingredients more effectively.In short, the Philips Compact Pasta and Noodle Maker is perfect for anyone who loves fresh pasta but wants to avoid the hassle of making it by hand. With its easy operation, simple clean-up, and versatile shaping discs, you’ll be whipping up delicious dishes in no time. Just be ready to experiment with ingredients to find your perfect pasta!

If you read the directions and use the right flour (I found the King Arthur pasta blend to be exactly right), it’s makes perfect pasta, delicious and super easy -15 minutes from start to ready to cook!

So I wanted to try making gluten free pasta. I got a different brand of machine several weeks ago that turned out to be positively a foul ball, and returned it. I replaced it with this unit based on its having such good reviews, and tried it today with brown rice flour. It's a production and a mess to make the pasta, but the alfredo macaroni bake came out well. Its real test will be how it holds up as leftovers. It held up pretty well after baking, but the real test will be its texture as leftovers because the store brands (chickpea etc) have been so disappointing. This unit let me get away with adding liquid/more flour to get the right texture (if it's doughy it's too wet and a dry mix will jam tight in the little dies) much better than its predecessor. I'll try increasing the xanthan gum to help it hold together better. The unit is sturdy and has a tiny drawer that's handy to store the two spare dies. The cord wrapping feature is a simple bonus, but meaningful for storage. Its instruction books are also very good. A winner!

What a crazy mess my first experience was! I’m surprised nobody else I can find mentioned the poor instructions in the black & white booklet that gives the wrong units of measurement for the egg/liquid ingredients. Instead of ml, like it’s marked on the included measuring cup, the manual’s written instructions labels the liquid in g, aka grams. I was thrown off by it and blame it in part for not getting good results the first try using semolina combined with whole wheat flour.I forgot to double the amount of egg & water to the 400 g doubled flour amount. It called for 150 g semolina and 50 g white flour. Liquid measure was supposed to read, 75 ml after you add 1 egg and top the liquid up to make it that amount. Double that would have been 150 ml. Instead, I was tearing my hair out wondering why it said to add grams instead of ml. My husband was probably right when he told me at that point that I shouldn’t have drunk any of the whiskey he had just brought home from a trip out to the local liquor store. lolI ended up with a big ball of dough that I knew, from past experience with an old machine I used to own, was too wet. I had to stop & rethink everything. I didn’t want to throw all that dough & egg away. I decided to split it into 2 halves & add another 100 g of flour, acc. to the included dry ingredients measuring cup, to each of the 2 separate batches I was about to remix.I didn’t have white AP flour I could use for adding to the dough. A few days prior, the new bag I just recently bought at the grocery store had a worm in the top when I opened it. I had to throw the whole bag away! I didn’t know I had another bag of white flour in storage until after I finished making the pasta in this machine! I found some bread flour I had in storage and added that in place of the white AP flour to the over-moist semolina dough mixtures.Somehow miraculously, it all worked out and I was able to extrude 2 good batches of pasta when all was said and done! FYI, I liked very much that the machine automatically went back to remixing the dough left in the machine so that it could extrude more of it out. But even after that, there was still residual dough left in it that it was unable to pick up and push through the extruder.The solution: take it out of the machine and push it back into the rectangular opening where the screw turning mechanism pushes it through to get it to extrude it. When you’ve done this enough times and you still have a small amount of dough left, make it into noodles by hand. Stretch it out between the palms of your hands and roll it into round noodle shapes. Having been a pottery artist for many years, this is very easy for me but I don’t think it’s hard for anyone to do.Another thing I had fun doing was pushing out the “buttons” of pasta dough that gets stuck in the dies, and cooking them in with the rest of the past without changing their shapes. You can reshape them if you want. And you can do the same with any and all the little bits of dough that gets left out.If you really want to get into it & you’ve made a bigger mistake that leaves a larger quantity of unextruded dough, you can get out your rolling pin. Roll the dough out into a flat sheet. Then cut it in noodle-shape slices. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!Another issue I had with the instructions is how it says to place the die on the opening by putting the non-existent arrow at the top. There are lines in die opposite each other but they don’t end up centered at the top if you push the die in firmly enough so that its little teeth fit into slots on the machine end that hold the die in place. This was very confusing. I didn’t know if I should keep the die loose and not push it into the machine or push it hard enough to make the teeth mesh with the gaps molded in on the machine. Very hard to describe the problem but if you’ve tried this, I think you’ll know what I’m talking about.Positives- I like the improvements they’ve made to this type of machine such as the built-in storage drawer on the bottom. The whole process being automatic from mixing to extruding is very nice. It’s nice and compact which is a big reason I bought this instead of the larger model. The scraper with metal rods built in at both ends is very handy for poking dough out of the holes in the dies when they need cleaning or if you need to clear a few holes while it extrudes and they get plugged up.Can’t wait to try this again with a better start the next time we want to eat pasta. Not sure if this machine’s motor is strong enough for it to last. I bought the added coverage in case it breaks down. I also bought the extra dies elsewhere that will fit this machine & await their arrival so that I can try them out.