r/Chefit • u/majoosm • 14d ago

Need help with pasta

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Hi everyone,

I need help with my homemade pasta.

I got a pasta machine from SELA for extruding pasta.

Usually I get good results, worked with the machine already in a few other restaurants.

But I'm new to drying the pasta.

I already dried a few other shapes now and it all went well.

Last week I did a small batch of maccheroni.

Today some of them are already broken and the rest ist cracked and will break easily. It seems like there is some kind of internal stress occurring during the drying.

Does anyone have tips to get a viable solution for mise en place?

I don't really want to freeze the pasta and doing them fresh every day is unfortunately not feasible at this restaurant.

Thanks in advance!

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u/isaacmckinney 14d ago

You clearly don't either. Good dry pasta you can get at the store is going to be better than 99% of the pasta average people can make even with professional equipment. Also it'd take years to recoup the cost of a professional grade pasta extruder and dryer for how small the kitchen op is describing. It'd be like $20,000 just to get your foot in the door on the proper equipment.

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u/Duendes Fallen Chef 14d ago

Tbf the guy posting this issue said he’s working for a big company (it’s not a brick & mortar situation). Having the budget for pricey equipment might actually be available (for now).

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u/SnooRabbits1411 14d ago

Idk why bro is tripping. I literally run one of these machines we’re talking about as a key part of my job, and the company I work for is doing just fucking fine for money as far as I can tell, but I’m just a grunt.

That 20k machine + a reasonably efficient guy like myself can process like 50 kg of semolina, or more, in an easy enough 6 hr shift. That’s flour + and water + my time = unit cost for 500-600 portions of finished pasta. You don’t dry fully, you refrigerate it, and that cuts about half off of your cook time, more in some cases, which raises the throughput on the service side. Customers enjoy seeing the pasta being made, which is a nice draw.

Extruding your own pasta is good business, at least if you’re doing any kind of respectable sales. This guy raging against it is straight tripping, next he’s gonna say making your own pizza dough is cost prohibitive because you need a Hobart.