pasta maker

Pasta Gun

My pasta gun came and I immediately tried it and I have thoughts.

On the Amazon product page, there’s videos of the person squeezing the pasta out directly into the boiling water. And I thought that was an optional step, but now I feel that it might just be a requirement.

When you squeeze the pasta out, the holes in the shape discs are about half the size of the pasta you’re going to get. Seriously, I did the little square noodles and they came out fat as hell–like, udon thick. Which is fine, because I like udon, but yeah: don’t expect your pasta to be the same size as the holes in the shape disc you use.

The machine has a sound, but it’s not too loud. You can feel a vibration in your hand, so if you’ve got nerve issues or something, be aware. The machine is also heavier than I thought, maybe two and a half pounds.

It seems like a quality build to me. Plastic tube and discs that seem like they can be sanitized with hot water. I kind of side-eye the extending press part, but as long as you keep an eye out to stop dough from going behind the press, you can just leave the extruder extruded and wash it without having to worry about any grossness somehow getting into the works.

The pasta gun is cleanable and kind of fun to use. When you drop the dough into the tube, the extruder smooshes it into the disc and the pasta comes out like play-doh. Which means you’ve got like a 6-inch long clear tube that you can see the dough all being smooshed into the end, then when the dough is compressed and there’s nowhere else for it to go, it starts coming out through the holes in the discs.

The holes are too close together for you to get the expected separated noodles. Maybe it was the thickness of my dough, but the noodles came out as separate strands then stuck together like Red Vines. It’s a problem that solves itself if you extrude the noodles directly into the boiling water. Then you use the scraper to cut the noodles free, reload the dough chamber, and keep pressing until the last batch when you can swish the tip or not. (Maybe not, because then you get semi-cooked dough clogged in the disc you used.)

I used the Chinese egg noodles recipe from The Woks of Life. It was tasty and I’ll use it again, but with respects to the pasta gun:

• the recipe makes 4 servings, so I split the dough into 4 sections. It squeezed out as it’s supposed to but made much less noodles than expected. NEXT TIME I’ll split the dough into maybe 8 or 12 pieces before adding to the pasta gun
• the dough might have been too wet for the pasta gun, so a drier recipe might have better results to make single strands for hanging and drying
• with the square shape disc, the noodles were very reminiscent of udon noodles for me (the kind that come in the refrigerated section of the grocery store). I used them in a stir-fry, but they seem like they would work great in a soup, and they’d cost a lot less then premade udon noodles (2 cups flour, 3 eggs, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 Tbsp water = cheaper than a large package of dry noodles or the seemingly tiny portions of the refrigerator packs).

In all, I think I like the pasta gun. I’m going to use it again and experiment, but it can definitely make noodles.

It’s very satisfying to switch it on and watch the dough squeeze out as strands.

Knox Goes Away

I ended up purchasing a digital copy of "Knox Goes Away" because there was only a few dollars difference between renting and buying.

It was a good movie. Very entertaining.

It’s also painful to watch in some places as you see a man known for his intelligence lose his memory and sense of self. That he’s a hitman adds depth to the characterization and urgency to the situation.

Knox is approached by his estranged son who has gotten himself into trouble. A stressful enough situation, but Knox is dealing with the knowledge that he’s quickly losing his mental facilities.

Why?

Because he’s got "variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease", otherwise known as Mad Cow Disease. I don’t see it as a spoiler because they mention it in the trailer. And if you haven’t seen the trailer, the Mad Cow Disease is not a big part of the plot. It’s just an explanation for why he only has a short window of time before he "goes away."

Alzheimer’s and most other conditions are more gradual and take longer to reach the point where Knox was misidentifying people within minutes of talking to them.

He degrades within weeks.

And part of the sadness of the movie is knowing there’s no treatment or cure for his condition. Because prions are just that bad ass.

Like, two things I’m scared of are prions and amoebas. Because if you get either, that’s pretty much it.

There’s a reason why they kill whole herds of cows if one of them is found to have Mad Cow Disease. And then they don’t bury the bodies; they burn them into ashes because if you bury them and any plants are grown on top of them, those plants can be contaminated.

It’s why I think a lot of zombie movies are dumb.

I get that that’s your loved one, but you likely don’t want to bury their bodies where they can ooze into your water table. Burn them for the sake of yourself and future generations.

I saw a thing where they’re suggesting that the reason the Brontë sisters and brother were so unhealthy and died young was because their house was downslope of a cemetery. Their well was getting water that was contaminated with runoff from dead bodies and the local sewage problem. (The life expectancy of the townspeople was 25 years!)

Anyways, "Knox Goes Away" was a good movie.

~Harper Kingsley

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