110V Stainless Steel Electric Noodle Making Pasta Maker, Commercial Dough Roller Noodle Cutting Machine (Dough Width 22cm, Noodle Width 2mm/6mm)

My wife and I were interested in making fresh noods for farmers markets, so we needed something a bit beefier than a residential countertop pasta maker, but we weren't ready to dive headfirst into a $5,000 industrial machine. This Chinese model - of which there are many variations available for purchase online - seemed like a really nice entry-level way to get into the pasta-making biz without a big capital investment. We've been using it for a couple of months now, and it's been a solid performer. There's definitely a learning curve, and while the included documentation is practically nonexistent (we only got a thin manual in Indonesian - thanks, Google Translate!), there are plenty of helpful videos floating around the internet. Alas, we did have to mix up several variations of dough at different hydration levels and, through trial and error, find the one that worked best for this machine. After that, things went pretty well: You use the rollers to knead the dough, then manually and progressively adjust the thickness to start rolling sheets. Once you get the sheets thin enough, you can cut them into noods. The included blades will cut both wide noods and spaghetti-style thin noodles with a quick adjustment, though the thin noods can be tricky. For whatever reason, it's tough to get the sheets to feed into the cutter properly, which can result in broken or roughed up noodles. Somehow, machine grease can end up on the noodles when this happens, which means manually checking the noods after they run through and cutting off the dirty bits. Sub-optimal, to say the least. We don't have this issue with wide cuts. With 550 watts, the machine is reasonably powerful - and it gets hot after more than 15 or 20 minutes of running. So hot that you need to be careful touching the surface of the motor cover. The manufacturers of these things say it's normal and designed for that heat, and that seems to be true: we've been running this thing for 6-10 hours a day, three days a week for the past six weeks, and no noticeable problems so far. It's a reasonably solid machine, but there are plastic parts that rattle around when this thing is running at full speed - which is always, because there's no speed adjustment. It's loud. No sneaky midnight noodle making while everyone else in the house is asleep. Although you can feed dough through this thing at a pretty good clip, the nature of the machine limits production. You need to mix up your dough on a different machine and let it rest first, then adjust the rollers to get progressively thinner, then stop to swap in the blades for the final cut. It can get a little tedious. Way faster than hand-rolling, but we can't get more than about 5 or 6 pounds an hour from it. We might get faster over time, but I'd estimate 7 or 8 pounds an hour as the absolute max. But that seems to be far and away the best production speed at this price point: anything faster is way more expensive.