PASTA MACHINES

Why fresh pasta machines?
In Italy, the daily production and consumption of fresh pasta is part of everyday life.

Anyone who has tasted fresh pasta in Italy knows how good it can be and why such fantastic pasta is rightly, the core of Italian cooking. In the UK currently, pasta of this quality and freshness is surprisingly rare.

Dried pasta is increasingly seen as a commodity and can be bought by the sack in any supermarket for very little.

But what consumers are told by supermarkets is value-added 'fresh' pasta is not fresh as the Italians know it, because it has been pasteurised, which changes the texture and taste. In addition the egg content of the pasta is normally low and it can contain preservatives. This is done to provide the shelf life and price-point that the supermarket supply-chain requires.

So where can the consumer go to experience the wonders of genuinely fresh pasta?

The answer we believe should be restaurants. Not just Italian restaurants but any restaurant that cares about the quality and authenticity of the food they serve.

There is no doubt about the growing consumer demand for high quality, fresh, locally produced food. Genuinely fresh pasta satisfies this demand with a very superior product. It is a real opportunity for restaurants and hotels to serve a quality of pasta that cannot be matched, and enable creative chefs to have control over the food they serve.

We believe the biggest reason restaurants don't serve pasta that they've made themselves, is because of the time-consuming process of mixing it and then rolling it out using a 'hand crank' (or even motorised!) sheeter.

All this has now changed, with the arrival in the UK of a revolutionary type of pasta machine, which makes fresh pasta of fantastic quality, very quickly and very easily

The Pasta Extruder
A pasta extruder will automatically mix pasta dough using any flour, including semolina, and produce dry, crumbly dough that if made by hand, would fail. However, the extruding is done under very high pressure and the crumbly mix is squeezed together and pushed through solid bronze dies that form the pasta shape.

An extruding machine is essential for making proper round spaghetti, authentic oval linguine and wonderful rigatoni, but superb quality lasagne sheet and flat pasta, from tagliolini to papperdelle, is also made using extruding machines. The result is a semi-automatic machine that can make all the pasta shapes you could ever want.

There are many things that make extruded pasta unique:

Extruding through bronze dies imparts a rough surface texture to the pasta that will hold a sauce better than pasta made by any other method. It is unique to extrusion through bronze and we believe that this makes bronze-die extruded lasagna sheet or fettuccine even better than machine-rolled flat pasta.

The extruded pasta is very dry so it won't stick together, making it very easy to handle and cook.

It's mixed "short" and doesn't develop the gluten strands as much, resulting in less bloat or "fullness" and a much nicer eating experience.

The complete process of mixing the dough and extruding a batch of pasta takes just 20 minutes. It can be cooked immediately.

An extruder is built so tough that semolina can be used, which is too hard to mix by hand. Eggs can be added for richness, producing pasta with greater firmness and bite than pasta made with '00' flour, while being softer and more absorbent than dried pasta.

The speed and simplicity of the mix and extrude process means that fresh pasta is very efficient to make and highly profitable, particularly when compared to buying-in fresh pasta


Our range of professional pasta machines
Our Italian partner is Bottene, who are the pioneers of pasta extruding machines. The company was founded in 1805 near Venice and had an Italian Royal Patent granted in 1875 for their manual extruder. It was called the Bigolaro and was responsible for Bigoli, the iconic fresh pasta of Venice and the Veneto. Bottene is still family owned and they produce a wide range of pasta extruding machines and ravioli machines.

The output of a pasta extruder is governed by the capacity of the flour hopper and there are six machines in the range, outlined below.

The machines are built using incredibly strong components, huge motors and the mixing hopper, mixing blade and extruding screw are all made from solid bronze or stainless steel. All our extruding machines operate in the same way, with the principal difference being the production rate.

Long pasta is cut to length by hand and short pasta is cut to length with an optional cutting device that is attached to the front of the extruding die (except for Lillo Due where it is cut by hand).

Cleaning the machines is very simple since the stainless steel mixer and the auger/screw are easily removable allowing the mixing bowl and internal extruding chamber to be thoroughly cleaned.

Lillo Due

Lillo Due is a fantastic example of Italian design at its best - seductively designed, totally functional and with brilliant performance! The hopper has a 1kg flour capacity and all you do is add the flour, turn the mixer on and add the liquids through the lid. Lillo Due will mix, knead and extrude pasta in one easy operation, producing enough pasta for 10 generous servings in about 20 minutes. If used continuously, Lillo has a capacity of 3kg of pasta per hour.

The Inver Range

The Inver-3 and Inver-7 pasta machines share the same design, differing only in the capacity they can produce. All ingredients are placed in the hopper, which has a capacity of 2kg for the Inver 3 and 5kg for the Inver-7. This will result in extrusion of 7-9 kg/hour with Inver 3 and 15-17 kg/hour with Inver-7. The kneader shaft and auger are removable for easy cleaning and four dies are supplied as standard - Spaghetti, Fettuccine, Rigatoni and Lasagne, with many more available. Long pastas are cut to length by hand. Short pastas use the optional automatic variable speed cutter, which can cut any length from tiny soup pastas to macaroni. All models from the Inver-7 upwards can use the optional dough roller to make rolls of pasta, ready for use in the B90 ravioli machine.

One of the advantages of the larger pasta machines is the wider range of pasta shapes, which includes Ritatoni of up to 35mm diameter, plus Linguine, Bucatini, Chitarre, Tagliolini, Pappardelle, Reginette, Conchiglie, Gnocchetti, Orecchiette, Lumache, Ruote, Fusilli, Casarecce, Radiatori, Grattata, Riso Medio.

The PM Range

The PM-80 pasta machine, pictured above, can produce a fantastic range of pasta with all the ease of the Lillo Due, but with much greater output. PM-80 has a 5 Kilo flour hopper and will make 15-17kg of pasta/hour. It is a free-standing machine and is supplied complete with an integrated stand, a ventilator and the pasta cutter, shown above cutting 35mm rigatoni made using semolina and pasteurised Italian egg yolks. The optional dough roller is used for preparing sheet for use in the B90 Ravioli machine.

Ravioli Machine The Ravioli machine is available in two versions, hand-operated or electric. It uses two rolls of pasta sheet, which can be produced on any of our pasta machines. With Lillo Due and Inver 3, the sheet must be hand-loaded onto the roller. With all other models the optional sheet roller attachment will automatically roll the pasta as it is being produced on the pasta machine. A range of interchangeable moulds makes it possible to produce different ravioli shapes - Square, Rectangular, Triangular, Half-moon and Round. The filling is placed in the hopper and the fill volume is easily regulated according to the mould size. The output depends on the size of the Ravioli but 50 - 150 pieces per minute can be produced, even on the manual machine. The Ravioli machine is made from stainless steel and is very easy to dismantle and clean. Standard mould sizes (mm) Square 35x35 Rectangular 70x60 and 50x40 Triangular 140x70 and 70x70 Half-moon 70x50 Round 35

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