Love Fresh Pasta? You Need This Stand Mixer-Powered One-Stop Noodle Shop (2024)

The KitchenAid name is synonymous with performance, quality, and style—particularly when it comes to the brand's stand mixers. A KitchenAid mixer comes equipped to mix batters, whip cream, and knead dough, but it also has a little cap on the front that lets you plug in various attachments that range from a meat grinder, to an ice cream churner, to this set of tools for shaping and cutting homemade pasta.

We've put KitchenAid's attachments to the test, both at home and in our Lab, and it's consistently one of our favorite pasta makers. It rolls and cuts effectively, creating delicious noodles and eliminating the need for a hand crank, but you do have to pay up for its automatic convenience. If you're torn between the KitchenAid pasta maker or a more affordable alternative, we hope our results will help make the decision.

Other than being motor-powered instead of muscle-powered, the KitchenAid attachments work much in the same way as most manual pasta machines. You feed dough through a pair of adjustable rollers to make a thinner and thinner sheet, then switch to a cutter to slice the sheet into individual noodles.

One great thing about the KitchenAid pasta attachment is that you can use the stand mixer itself to prepare pasta dough before you shape. We've used our fresh pasta recipe and egg noodles recipe in different tests, and both achieved beautiful texture with the stand mixer dough hook, eliminating the need for manual kneading.

Our fresh fettuccine tasted fantastic, with the springy chewiness that sets fresh pasta apart from the store-bought stuff. A few hours on a pasta drying rack before cooking helped the noodles maintain their shape, and they made for restaurant-quality fettuccine Alfredo. On the other hand, several of the manual machines we tested made equally delicious pasta; the KitchenAid only automates the process.

When it came to cutting pasta, the KitchenAid stood above its competitors, both manual and electric. Most other cutters didn't completely separate the strands, making more of a perforation we had to pull apart by hand. This was more notable with spaghetti than fettuccine: Thinner noodles seem to be more difficult to slice effectively. The KitchenAid cut all of our test noodles completely, with smooth and clearly defined edges—it was the only model whose spaghetti didn't need any manual intervention at all.

This set is easier to use solo than manual machines. With a hand-cranked pasta maker, we've found that it's useful to have a helper: You need three hands to be able to turn the crank, feed in the dough, and hold the rolled sheet at the same time. That's not the case with the KitchenAid, which keeps the wheels turning slowly and steadily all by itself.

The KitchenAid pasta maker pieces all look sleek, feel heavy-duty, and lock firmly in place without wobbling. They're built well and made to last for decades. An unfortunate design choice, however, is that you can only have one attachment connected to the mixer at once. When you're done rolling out a dough sheet, you have to carefully set it aside, remove the roller, and attach a cutter before you continue. Many manual models' cutters mount to the roller and let you do both steps at once.

Cleaning out these attachments is tedious, but it's still easier than cleaning most of their competitors. Very few pasta makers can even get wet, so you have to take them apart and carefully brush away leftover dough and flour. This is the case with the KitchenAid set, too, but the attachments assemble and disassemble with ease, and the included brush is shaped perfectly to get into their nooks and crannies. (There also won't be much to clean off in the first place; the clean cutting keeps any dough from getting caught and squeezed into places it's not supposed to be.)

Here's where we get to the biggest negative about the KitchenAid pasta maker set: price. It costs more than twice as much as our top-rated manual machine—plus, you have to own a fairly expensive stand mixer to even use it. There are additional cutters available to make additional pasta shapes, but they're sold separately, and not for cheap. Nonetheless, the automation could be worth it, especially if you already have the necessary stand mixer.

Competition

• Marcato Atlas 150 Pasta Machine: Our choice for the top overall pasta maker, this Italian-made machine has essentially the same capabilities as the KitchenAid set, without as steep a price. It worked wonderfully in testing, delivering quality, consistent results. It's just not electric. The cost savings comes because you'll have to crank the thing by hand.
• OxGord Pasta Maker Machine: This manual machine gets the job done reasonably well, and it does it for just 30 bucks. It's not as well-made as the KitchenAid set or the Marcato Atlas 150, but it's an affordable starter option for novices to cut their teeth on.
• Philips Viva Collection Pasta and Noodle Maker: This is a completely different style of pasta maker, an extruder machine that mixes and kneads the dough for you, then pushes it through holes in a die to shape noodles. An extruder like this one can make a much wider variety of pasta, including tubes and spirals that are impossible with a rotating cutter, but it's also quite expensive, especially in comparison to a manual roller.

Why Trust The Spruce Eats?

Tierney McAfee wrote this review after testing the KitchenAid 3-Piece Pasta Roller and Cutter Set at home, along with the Marcato and OxGord pasta makers mentioned above. Besides going in-depth on pasta makers for The Spruce Eats, she's also written about food, travel, and decor for People, NBC News, and Hollywoodlife.com.

The Spruce Eats commerce writer Jason Horn updated this story with further insights from our Lab testing of pasta makers. He's been a food and drinks journalist for nearly 20 years, for publications including Liquor.com, Serious Eats, and Playboy.