The Best Tools for Homemade Pasta of All Different Shapes

Pasta is sublime in its simplicity: you truly need nothing more than flour, water, and your own hands. But just because it can be that minimalistic doesn’t mean it needs to be. There is a deep, exquisite rabbit hole you can go down exploring pasta-making tools. Some tools are ancient and soaked in Italian tradition, others are modern and made around the globe. Some tools are dedicated to one—and only one—type of pasta, while others are multifunctional. There are tools to speed up the process and those purely to add artistic flourish. And there are ones made from wood, metal, plastic, and even strings and twine. 

But which pasta-making tools should you have in your kitchen? That is completely dependent on what shape you want to make…and your pasta dogma. I’ve talked to women in Southern Italy who literally scoff at the mention of new-age (meaning created in the last century or so) tools like electric pasta extruders and even manual cavatelli cranks. One pastaia I met on the streets of Bari showed me her great great-great-grandmother’s knife that she uses to scrape semolina and water dough nuggets into orecchiette. The handle had broken off and the exposed shaft dug into her hand, but it was the only tool for her.

Like just about everything in Italy, pasta tools are incredibly regionally specific and historically rooted. If you are still exploring and developing your own pasta exegesis, here’s a collection of pasta-making tools, some traditional and some quite modern (apologies to my Pugliese mentors) to check out.