My now-shuttered restaurant, Musi, in Philadelphia, was known for pasta that had no connection to Italy, because working with dough is a universal experience. I wanted to expand the repertoire of what pasta could do, but at the same time, that meant stripping pasta down to its essential components: flour and water (and, okay, sometimes eggs). During pandemic lockdowns, I shifted my pasta operation from my restaurant to my house (and went viral with one foul-mouthed pasta video). I had to retrain my restaurant-chef brain to work in a smaller space, with tools geared for the home kitchen. Here are the most essential tools to produce world-class fresh pasta, whether you’re looking to make hand-cut fettuccine, ravioli, or any number of fancy, esoteric shapes at home.
You need a sheet pan for when you make your pasta and need someplace to put it and you have plans to move it or freeze it. I usually sprinkle a little bit of flour on the sheet pan before I put my pasta down.
You need to have your pasta covered so it doesn’t dry out. When you roll out your pasta, you roll it out into sheets. Those sheets get cut into small pieces, whether they’re circles or squares. You need to keep those pasta pieces in a covered environment while they’re waiting to be folded. A half-sheet cover is also nice if you want to store your pasta and your freezer has space for it.
This is not something I use regularly — you can also use a hanger. I don’t generally dry my pasta, since I usually freeze it. But if you do want to dry pasta, this makes it a lot easier, because it prevents spaghetti or long, hand-cut noodles like pappardelle and fettuccine from sticking together.
You need a pastry bag to pipe in filling for tortellini, agnolotti, ravioli, or any filled pasta. You could use a spoon or your fingertip for tortellini of a certain size, or you might need a decorator tip depending on how small you want to go. But a piping bag makes it so much easier to portion out filling quickly and efficiently. Silicone makes sense for a piping bag because it’s easier to clean than a typical canvas pastry bag. They are also very useful for filling deviled eggs. I find 18 inches to be the right size because it holds enough filling for just about any project you do at home, and you can always refill it. Anything larger can be a little unwieldy.
A pasta board is not absolutely necessary, but if your space and budget allows for it, then get one. This one lays on top of a counter securely. Even if you work dough in a KitchenAid or machine, you’re generally going to need to finish working it by hand. It’s nice to have a surface with a texture like wood so that it provides some friction for kneading.
I love this one because it fits in the hand well and it’s a straightforward tool that does the job. You can use it to scrape your bench of excess flour and little bits of dough that have stuck to the surface — and because it’s wood, it’s not going to damage your surface like a metal one might. I’ve been using this same one for five years, and it has held up beautifully.
The OXO scale’s display is large and on a screen that pulls out so that you can comfortably read it even if a bowl is resting on it. You need a kitchen scale because when you are making your dough, you’re measuring ingredients according to weight. Any good recipe will go by weight and not volume, and a scale should be one of the most essential tools in your kitchen, even if you’re not making pasta.
If you have a KitchenAid, this makes rolling pasta fast, fun, and easy. It pops into the port on the mixer, and it rolls the dough quickly and evenly to different degrees of thickness. You can roll the dough thin enough even for the most delicate tortellini. The only drawback that people mention with this is that you need a KitchenAid stand mixer, but if you’re a home cook, having one is game changing.
If you don’t have a KitchenAid, you’re going to roll your pasta through a hand-crank machine. You need to attach it to a counter or table with a clamp, and you roll your pasta between its two rollers until you get the thinness that you want. You increase the thinness incrementally by turning the knob on the side. The classic is the Atlas 150, but the 180 is just a little bit wider, so it gives your dough more surface area.
If you’re making pasta, you need a rolling pin, no matter what pasta machine you’re using. You need to roll your dough out to some point of thinness so you can fit into your pasta roller. I like this straight pin, because you want your pasta to be straight and not curved. This one is the right size, and it’s a general-use rolling pin that’s good for anytime you’re doing dough work. Wood pins give your dough texture, and the weight of this one is nice — neither too light nor too heavy.
This is essential if you’re making any folded or filled pasta for the same reason you need a cover: The dough shouldn’t dry out before it’s folded or crimped. You also often need to wet the edges of the pasta so that it sticks to itself when it’s folded. A light spritz with the spray bottle can accomplish either task.
When you are rolling your pasta and you want to flour it to keep sheets from sticking to each other, you might later want to brush that flour off them. When you’re filling ravioli or agnolotti, you don’t want that extra flour inside your pasta. If you’re folding pasta, you don’t want that excess flour in the pinch, either. This brush is easy to hold and straightforward to use, and it holds up nicely.
I use these for ravioli, tortellini, and any pasta shape that has to start with a circle. These round cutters come in 11 sizes, so you can make raviolo al uovo, which is one large ravioli stuffed with a whole, intact egg yolk, down to the tiniest little tortellini. They’re also useful for stamping out cookies, cutting cake rounds, shaping biscuits before you make them, molding steak tartare (if you want to get fancy), and frying an egg in a perfect circle for homemade sausage-egg McMuffins.
I like this pasta bike because it lets you quickly cut your dough into squares or rectangles for when you want to make simple folded shapes like bow ties and tiny Bolognese-style tortellini and sorprese (which look like tortellini but have no filling). Bow ties are my signature shape. The cutter doesn’t really allow you to cut sheets of pasta easily into noodles like fettuccine, but it lets you make even, equally sized squares, and it’s fun to use.
Having a good wooden gnocchi board lets you expand your repertoire. If you’re making classic gnocchi or cavatelli that you would roll with your thumb, you can roll it against the back of a fork or the front of a box grater, but having a wooden board will make you feel fancier. It also lets you, with its dowels, make garganelli.
Having a cutter wheel, especially a fluted one, is really special when you want to make agnolotti or caramelle or anything that you want to have a little flair. It lets you crimp edges so you get a better seal on stuffed pastas. If you want fluted edges on bowties, there’s no other way to go about it.
I love playing with pasta dough, and that often means adding ingredients to see different results. You can add ground spices or herbs through sauces or toppings, but it’s less frequently seen to color and spice pastas with actual spices. I end up using all the tools in this list more often when I have a fun dough idea I want to try. Something like adding the Floyd Cardoz masalas from Burlap and Barrel makes it all the more interesting when you’re making pasta for your family or having friends over and want a conversation piece.
These are to replace plastic wrap (they’re reusable). When you let your dough rest after it’s made, it needs to be in an airtight container. You could use Tupperware, but using a bag like this allows you to push the air out and away from your dough. You need to store your dough in between rolling out portions, and these bags work for that as well.
A super-straightforward pot, stainless steel, and a nice size for cooking at home that works on both induction and a gas range. Water boils faster with a lid on the pot, and the lid keeps the water from evaporating. And Ikea makes standard pots for a reasonable price.
You need a strainer for pulling your pasta out of the water. I don’t use a colander because when I cook my pasta in a pan with sauce, I want to be able to ladle pasta water from the pot into the pan with the sauce. I also don’t want to pour all that pasta water down the drain. I reserve most of my pasta water, not just a few tablespoons like you see chefs cooking on TV doing. Pasta water is the unsung hero of your kitchen. You can use it for sauces, stocks, and even in your cocktails. It gives all of these depth, flavor, and a bit of body, and, since your pasta water should be salted, a little salinity. Once my pasta water is cool, I’ll freeze it in small containers to use in other applications.
You need a knife for pasta-making. It’s for cutting sheets of pasta as well as noodles such as tagliatelle and fettuccine. This knife is a straightforward, decent knife that does the job without breaking the bank. It can double as your go-to kitchen knife. There’s no reason to use your fancy Japanese steel knife for this because it’s going to be more expensive and hard to maintain. You don’t need a fancy knife for pasta, just something functional, basic, and not trash.
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