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[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-FJ150-Pinzon-5-9-Inch-Pasta/dp/B001CGMKA4/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1275196521&sr=8-4"]Amazon.com: Pinzon 5-9-Inch Pasta Maker: Home & Garden[/ame]


(I paid $32 for this; the price has gone down to $25 this weekend.)
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They told me so, y'all. I read the reviews in amazon.com and it was clear that the handle falls out. Someone said it was cheaply made. I said to myself, "I'll be aware and careful with the handle, and hey, it looks pretty solid to me." I didn't have the hundred bucks to get an Atlas... so I sprang for the Pinzon.

You get what you pay for. I'd have been happier with a tortilla press for $15. But hey, I wanted to make tortillas AND pasta.

The first thing I discovered is that the clamp doesn't work at ALL. Here's the thing about cheaply made: it isn't limited to flimsy, like I was thinking. It can also cover improperly sized holes, so that the clamp won't screw to the countertop. It can cover a handle that fell out no less than twenty times while I was being careful and landed on the floor every single time--well, except that one time it landed on the dog.

Cheaply made also covers things like noodle and spaghetti cutters that DON'T cut, and that are wider at one end so that the noodles are not an even thickness. It took me longer to pull the noodles apart than it did to run them through the machine in the first place.

Cheaply made also covers things like the holes on the dial not being lined up with the numbers, so that you never know exactly what thickness you're using; and things like cleaning instructions that refer to non-existent plastic parts.

There is no actual manual, just an instruction sheet with vague photos and an admonition to never wash the machine, and the aforementioned reference to non-existent parts.

My test run of tortillas was almost a disaster, but I finally realized that I needed to run them through in a specific pattern, and stretch them by hand after they came out of the machine. They tasted fine and the texture was what I expected, even if the sizes and shapes were a little wonky.

The noodles, on the other hand, did not have the texture I expected until I ran them through several times on succeedingly thinner settings. Since Gryph likes thick noodles--one reason to make them at home--being forced to use the thinner settings was a problem, and also made some of the noodle sheets waaay too long for easy handling.

The cutter thicknesses are not adjustable--how it comes is how it is.

It definitely takes two people and four hands to catch the noodles as you feed the dough through. This may be mostly due to inexperience, but at least part of it is due to the sheets being so thin and therefore long.

All in all, it would have been less work to buy the tortilla press and just slice the flattened dough into noodles with kitchen scissors or a paring knife. I suspect it would be easy enough to put logs of dough into a press and get flat oblongs for easy slicing.

I won't ever buy a Pinzon product again.

I also won't ever buy storebought noodles again--as bad as this product is, it still saved my wrists considerable wear and tear... but what sold me?

The first batch of fresh homemade noodles, rolled, "cut" and then separated right into boiling broth. FOODGASM. Seriously--foodgasm.