I've gone through a few pasta makers over my lifetime and was looking for a new one. This makes great pasta in just a few minutes. It's well designed and easy to clean. I really like the compact size, too. Great buy.

The Philips Viva compact pasta maker is a nice supplimental pasta maker. The key to good homemade pasta is getting the correct proportions of liquid to flour. and using the correct type of flour. The pasta recipe booklet that is included in the package simplifys the process. It is important to follow the directions exactly as written to get a quality production.

One thing that differentiates a automatic pasta machine is the texture of the end product. Tends to be a little thicker than traditional boxed dry pasta. It tastes a little different in a good way. The big advantage is how quickly the machine produces pasta. On the average it takes 15 minutes to make enough pasta for 3-4 servings. If you want larger production Philips does make a larger pasta maker, but is significantly more expensive. There si a learning curve to master, but overall a great ;compact machine.

There was a bit of a learning curve at the beginning, but now that I've gotten the hang of it I Love this thing! Nothing compares to the taste of fresh pasta and it's even better when you throw some herbs in too! Overall it's pretty easy to use, just have to make sure you follow the recipes exactly. If it looks too dry, it's not! Just let it do its thing

Ever since I have met my wife my entire way of cooking has had to change. She has celiacs disease and it is so bad she can't even touch regular flour without it entering her bloodstream...I used to think going Gluten Free was for Gwenyth Paltrow and her goop troop. But I have adjusted and just simply gotten used to eating crappy pasta. Because let's face it....gluten free pasta sucks.

Until now.

I ended up buying this because making Italian food is one of my favorite dishes to make...I miss the flour everywhere...I miss the warm pasta feel as you make it etc. But with gluten free pasta I was hovering dangerously close between cardboard and pasta so heavy that it would make some unladen Jewish bread seem like a chewy treat.

****THE REVIEW***
When I unboxed this thing I had my doubts. How in the hell was this thing going to make any kind of decent pasta. But my wife was excited again for pasta and so we just went for it. Pictured above is actually our first batch. You can literally still see the box and instructions on the right. Our first batch came out literally perfect. We used King Authors 1:1 gluten free flour. We ate a couple of noodles straight off that rack and they were amazing. Even better with some homemade sauce we had made just prior.

FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS EXACTLY AS IT IS WRITTEN IN THE PASTA MAKING KIT
and for people like me that ignore that sentence because we know better let me say it again
FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS EXACTLY AS IT IS WRITTEN IN THE PASTA MAKING KIT

I seriously can't express this enough. Our second batch I decided I knew better. I changed the ratio based off another recipe I had been making hand made pasta with...put that recipe into the maker and it was total garbage...the first noodles to come out were almost as good as the first ones...then the ratio was off and not enough liquid for the rest of the flour and it ended up blocking up the mixer. I ended up throwing out the batch. I tried again using more eggs then what my recipe called for and the noodles weren't garbage ready but they were not the caliber I am used to serving in my house to guests...and then I went back to the recipe as it is on the website using the flour weight instead of cup measurements...and voila! Back to perfect noodles.

again...shouting warning
WEIGH YOUR FLOUR. DO NOT PACK IT INTO A MEASURING CUP...seriously. I did this wrong twice and forgot another time...your end result will almost always tell you how you messed up...now if Philips could make a fridge warning me I am putting the cereal into it instead of the milk I would appreciate it.

Clean up is not so much fun...but seriously when is it ever...there is flour, egg, and mess everywhere and in every nook and cranny...while it is fairly easy to take apart and put back together...if you miss anything...the next time you take it out though it will be as if you left concrete inside of your machine.

We have owned it about a month now and we have made 11 batches of pasta and only 3 were horrible...and all of those were my mistake. If you want gluten free pasta (I am sure regular pasta too but there is so much good pasta out there why make your own) that tastes amazing...with the ability to make almost ANY kind of pasta (lemon pepper pasta and tomato basil are our favorites so far) I seriously cannot recommend this enough.

We made all our bread with a bread machine now. Shipping Udons when everybody stays at home for lunch cost us a fortune. Organic spaghetti tastes OK if we fry it. So it seems that this machine will be a good choice if it works.

I never believed the videos of making noodles. And it looked like a whole of extra junk to clean up. But this one is from Philips. And if I don't like it I can return it, most likely leaving it out at my door.

I didn't think about economics before. The worse you can get is saving 23 cents per 200 g of noodles without the egg, for 2 to 3 people. This compares organic flour with organic spaghetti from Whole Foods, doesn't count electricity, water, and labor So it takes 1.9 years to break even if you make 200 g every day.

If you add the organic egg, you are losing 19 cents per 200 g of noodles. But spaghetti doesn't have eggs.

The disassembly and reassembly were easy. Except that the triangle marker on the spaghetti disc was so faint that I thought the manual was talking about something else.

The process is so much easier than the bread machine. There is no confusion. Pour 200 g of flour into the chamber out of the way. Close the lid and then turn on the machine. And then pour an 80 ml total of egg plus water into the chamber slowly over the lid. There are only 80 ml of liquid so it can't take much time. There are only 200 g of flour so the whole process doesn't take much time either.

I can't believe that the machine did it right the first time. There are no sensors. A simple motor is controlled by a program. But the machine makes spaghetti like a robot. A spaghetti isn't uniform across the length but the imperfection disappeared after cooking.

If not cooking immediately, I would cover the spaghetti so it won't get dry easily. It will start stiffening up and may break when you move them.

I boiled the basic spaghetti recipe for 8 minutes. It tastes like, well, spaghetti.

You can put everything except the motor into the dishwasher. All the plastic is of good quality. They can be rinsed clean. There is a brush with a hard scrubber and a silicone soft scrubber to take out the few flours that are left behind. The flat cleaning tool is actually the metal pin in the middle, each end of which is used to clear holes on the discs.

It's not Korean ramen, not authentic udon, but I've been there before settling on spaghetti now. I'm very happy with it. Perhaps I'll think of something that justifies me against ordering spaghetti on our weekly grocery order.