extruded vs. cut pasta?

[OliverB]

I've been reading in Culinaria Italy and came across images of hand extruded pasta. They use a tool that's basically a brass pipe, a screw plunger part and a bottom with exchangeable bottom plates with different hole sizes. The pasta they show looks amazing, tiny little "thorns" opeining away from the main strand (like a very prickly rose stem) that I'm sure will hold great amounts of sauce, very different from pasta cut with a pasta machine.

Now, I'm not ready to plop down a couple hundred for the Italian machine (called a bigolaro) as pretty as they are, nor a couple thousand for an electric machine. Some stand mixers seem to have extruder attachments, do those work well? Like most of those attachments they seem rather small and toy like. I don't have a stand mixer, so I can't try that.

Would my meat grinder work? I might just try that. Or the sausage stuffer?

Would it be worth the trouble to try? Curious if anybody here makes both or decided for one of the other. It wold be nice to make macaroni and others with holes in them I guess.

Opinions?

Oliver

[slkinsey]

You can make a kind of bigoli using a meat grinder, yes.

Keep in mind that this is not the same thing as factory-made dry pasta. You're making a certain shape of fresh pasta, is all.

[OliverB]

I might just have to try that since I just got a meat grinder :-)

It seems that the pasta gets a much rougher surface which should help holding sauce. With the pasta machine I get very smooth pasta, the extrusion process seems to make those little thorns pop up.

[slkinsey]

Give it a try. Duck ragù is a classic condiment.

[nickrey]

Give it a try. Duck ragù is a classic condiment.

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Sam

I love that phraseology.

Sauce is a condiment for pasta not the central part of the meal as so many people think.