Reference
Pasta tools
The kit for making fresh tagliatelle is short, mostly wooden, and barely changed in three centuries. Most of it can be bought new in any Bolognese kitchenware shop and will last a lifetime. A few items have modern equivalents that do the same work faster, with small sacrifices in texture and considerable savings in muscle.
Mattarello
The mattarello is the Italian rolling pin: a single long cylinder of beech, maple, or cherrywood, 80 to 100 centimetres long, 3 to 4 centimetres in diameter, with no handles and no bearings. The cylinder rolls between the palms, not between handles; the length lets you roll a full sfoglia in one pass without re-positioning. British and American rolling pins with handles are short (40 to 45 cm), designed for pie pastry, and unsuitable for pasta sheets.
A good mattarello is straight, dense, and slightly polished from use; it should feel heavy in the hand without being unwieldy. New, in Italy, it costs in the range of €15 to €40 depending on wood and finish. With basic care — a brushing-clean after use, an occasional rub with food-safe mineral oil — it will last lifetimes. Two Italian generations of family use is common.
Spianatoia
The spianatoia is the wooden rolling board, typically beech or chestnut, 80 to 100 cm long by 60 to 80 cm wide, plain or with a small lip at one end to hook over the table edge for stability. The grain runs along the length. Both woods are slightly absorbent — they take up a small amount of moisture from the dough — and have a fine grain that provides just enough grip without sticking. A clean wooden kitchen table will do; marble is too cold and slick; plastic boards work but lack the slight friction that makes hand-rolling easier.
Wash the spianatoia by scraping with a metal scraper (the raschietto) to remove dough, then wiping with a damp cloth. Never submerge in water; never wash in a dishwasher. Both will warp the wood. Dry standing on end after each use.
Raschietto (or tarocco)
The raschietto or tarocco is the rectangular dough scraper: a flat blade of stainless steel or plastic, 10 to 12 cm wide, set into a wooden or plastic handle along the top edge. It is the most-used small tool in the pasta kitchen. Uses include scraping the board clean of stuck dough, dividing a kneaded ball into portions, lifting a delicate rolled sheet from one part of the board to another, and gathering stray flour into a pile. Italian pasta makers use it dozens of times during a single session. Buy two: one always wanders.
Rotella dentellata (and rotella liscia)
The rotella is a small pastry wheel on a wooden or plastic handle, with the wheel either smooth (liscia) or fluted (dentellata). The fluted wheel cuts pasta dough with a wavy edge; the smooth wheel cuts a straight edge but faster than a knife. Common uses include cutting pappardelle with a decorative fluted edge, cutting the edges of ravioli and tortelli, and cutting corzetti discs. Less essential for tagliatelle, which is canonically cut with a long knife after rolling, but useful for the wider Tuscan ribbons.
Pasta machine
The hand-crank pasta machine is the modern shortcut for hand-rolling. Two manufacturers dominate the home market: Imperia (Pinerolo, Piedmont, founded 1932) and Marcato (Padova, founded 1930). Both make hand-crank sheet rollers in chrome-plated steel, with a body that clamps to a kitchen counter and a roller assembly with adjustable thickness settings (typically 0 to 9). Both come with at least one cutter attachment carrying two cutting widths: a wider channel for tagliatelle (about 6.5 mm) and a narrower channel for tagliolini (about 1.5 to 2 mm). The Imperia SP 150 and the Marcato Atlas 150 are the standard models; both have rolling-width and cutting-width of 150 mm.
Electric and stand-mixer attachments exist (KitchenAid pasta roller, Philips Pasta Maker for full extrusion, and others); the hand-crank versions remain the standard for fresh egg ribbon pasta. Buy a hand-crank machine; learn it; it will last forty years. See using a pasta machine for the full workflow.
Long knife
For hand-cutting the rolled sheet into ribbons, a long sharp chef's knife, at least 25 centimetres, is the canonical tool. Italian sfogline often use a slightly longer pasta knife (coltello da pasta), 28 to 32 cm, with a thinner blade for cleaner cuts. The knife must be sharp; a dull knife crushes rather than cuts and seals the edges of the ribbons together.
Stendipasta
The stendipasta is a pasta-drying rack, traditionally a small wooden tree-form stand with several horizontal arms radiating from a central pole, on which freshly cut ribbons are draped to air-dry. Modern versions sometimes use folding metal arms; both work. Useful for full air-drying of pasta for tin storage; less needed for everyday fresh use, where the cut ribbons are formed directly into nidi on a tray. See drying and storing for the full protocol.
Chitarra (a distinct tool)
The chitarra — literally 'guitar' — is an Abruzzese tool: a wooden frame strung with closely spaced steel wires, on which a rolled pasta sheet is pressed with a rolling pin, the wires cutting the dough into square-section strands. The strands produced are called spaghetti alla chitarra or maccheroni alla chitarra. The chitarra is included here because it sometimes surfaces in non-Italian writing as a tagliatelle-making tool; it is not. It is specific to Abruzzese pasta and produces a different shape (square section, not flat ribbon) from tagliatelle. Mentioning it is to disambiguate.
Tagliatartufi
The tagliatartufi is the truffle slicer: a small handheld tool with an adjustable steel blade set on a stainless-steel or horn body. Used to shave raw truffles — white truffle of Alba in season — over the finished pasta at the table. Not a pasta-making tool but a pasta-finishing one. Worthwhile if you ever cook with truffle; superfluous otherwise. A vegetable peeler or a sharp knife can serve in extremis but produces slabs rather than the delicate ribbons the proper slicer makes.
Smaller useful items
- Wooden spoon. For stirring the pasta water and for the final toss in the sauce pan. The Italian preference is a long-handled flat spoon.
- Slotted spoon or spider. For lifting cooked pasta directly into the sauce pan without draining first — an alternative to the colander for fresh pasta, useful when the pasta water is to be reserved (which is always).
- Wide skillet or sauté pan. The pan in which the sauce is finished. Wide enough to lay out the cooked pasta in a single layer.
- Microplane or Italian grater. For grating Parmigiano-Reggiano at the table.
- Pepper mill. Black pepper at the finish of nearly every dish.