© G.Mondelli Studio - Italy

COMMENTS ON AUTOMATIC SHEET PASTA MACHINES

	Structure of the section Sheet pasta machines with cylinders side by side Solutions adopted by manufacturers The most common defects
Introduction
To approach the technical principles that automatic sheet pasta machines are based on and to understand how they work, we should reconsider how pasta is made by hand and analyse the gestures habitually made. After sieving the flour to form a mound, you add eggs and mix it all together. When the flour has absorbed all the liquid you start kneading the dough to make it uniform, folding it over and pressing it with your fists. You repeat this several times to get a uniform mass of dough. At this stage you start to roll out the dough with a rolling pin, first getting a thick sheet which is gradually made thinner as you roll it out, it gets pressed down as the rolling pin passes over it. When people started using machines to make sheet pasta, after mixing the flour with the liquid, the dough was put into a kneading machine. Here we should stress that even though the utmost attention is paid to mix the liquid with the flour gradually, it is inevitable that granules of different sizes will get formed in a mechanical kneader. These granules will be that much bigger the faster the liquid is added. They are composed of a very damp core, which is not kneaded, surrounded by a drier layer of flour. In other words, at this stage of treatment, the moisture in the mass is by no means uniform. The kneading machine mechanically reproduces the work you do with your fists when kneading dough by hand, repeatedly compressing it and at the same time moving it towards its centre. This distributes the moisture evenly and the gluten that has formed can thereby bond strongly with the starch in the flour, making the mass of dough compact. Cut into pieces, the dough is then passed between two overlapping rollers (cylinders), starting to gradually make it thinner with repeated rolling to obtain a sheet of the desired thickness. Some pasta manufacturers still use this method today, but they form a brave minority.

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