Play Dough Machine for Pressing Pasta

I have always wanted to make my own pasta, and its been on my list for a long time, but I really didn't want to mess with hand cutting my own noodles, and I did not want to buy a $50 dollar pasta machine.

However, while researching another project I happened to find a $20 sheet press for polymer clay that looks exactly like a pasta roller.  Being the cheapskate I am, I started thinking about even cheaper ways to solve the problem when it hit me.  Play Dough is Dough...  A play doh fun factory is around 6 dollars, and if it didn't work, my wife could use it in her class (she is a special educator that works with autistic children).

To test I just made a simple pasta dough recipe 2 cups flour, 2 eggs, knead until you have a ball of pasta dough.

I dug through the package to get the dough press and the two sliding bars with different sized holes and shapes.

After some experimentation, I found that the bar with the 4 small squares made the best compromise between shape and ease of use.  If I tried to press the dough through the very small holes, the pressure created caused the dough to escape from every available orifice on the machine.

Once I had the noodles made, I simply dumped them in a pot of boiling water and cooked for about 3 minutes.

This works, but unless you want to make stars or some other funky shaped noodle, then I found it much easier just to hand cut the dough into noodles.  But I think it was a neat experiment, and as I said in the video, once my boy gets to the age where he likes playing with play dough, we will recreate this experiment to start crossing over into cooking.