I'm thinking about making my own pasta. "Common brands" available locally are sold out chronically due to hoarding and panic buys in addition to being a flavorless mushy pasty waste of salted water IMHO.
This takes me to looking at the common online places to find better pasta options but, to be blunt I see a lot of price-gouging ($7 and $8 per pound for De Cecco and Colavita for example at many places that are in stock and my Walmart orders were canceled). At $2 or $3 a pound, it may be worth a try but, at the price of a reasonable steak, I think I should be able to get a better quality product.
This has me thinking it might be time to give pasta-making at home a whirl!
One of the common pasta rollers is easy to source for the spaghetti, linguine, fettuccine shapes which seems like a good start but, I really think about getting into a brass die extruder for texture reasons and I want to be able to make Bucatini and similar small strands with the hole in them. Heck, I might even try twirling some around a wooden dowel for the spiral shapes too!
Can anyone comment on the better options to look at and models to avoid? I'm assuming home-based brass die extruders exist that are somewhat cost-competitive with a Kitchenaide mixer option but, I have no idea where to start at the moment. Will $200 get me something reasonable for non-commercial quantities of pasta in common shapes? Or do I really need to raise my budget to get a quality piece of gear?
What gear is reasonable for me? Are there different price ranges for this hardware like you have for Espresso Machines (single boiler, double boiler, heat exchangers, etc.) or flour or coffee grinders?
TIA,
Sid
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