I have a Marcato Ampia 150 pasta roller machine - until yesterday I had never attempted to take it apart to clean it (cleaning normally consisting of attempting to shake loose any residual flour or crumbs of dough), but it doesn’t seem like this thing was even designed to be disassembled after manufacture; two of the bolts holding it together are driven in very close to part of the housing, such that none of my standard sockets will go over the bolt head, and the metal cap of the thickness selector knob is a flush, press-fit into the knob and certainly isn’t going to come back out without damaging it (I may drill a hole in it and try to use that to pull it off).
But it’s clear to me that these machines do need to be taken apart for a proper deep-clean (and this one appears to be built on the explicit, opposite assumption) - even in the partly-disassembled state I’ve managed to achieve with mine, various crumbs and pieces of old pasta dough have emerged (or are now visible through the opened parts, but remain stuck inside the machine). Some of the pieces that came out were black and/or green with ancient mould.
Soaking or jet-washing the machine doesn’t appear to be a viable option either - some of the parts such as springs are clearly not stainless and will probably rust, and I think getting the whole thing wet will probably still not remove some of the very inaccessible crumbs - rather, just moisten them and give them a fresh chance to grow mould.
I’m not the most hygiene-obsessed person in the kitchen, but it seems weird to me that a machine designed to work with a friable foodstuff, and with internal cavities in the mechanism, can’t be readily taken apart for cleaning; I’d normally expect such a thing to be amenable to tool-less disassembly, or for the disassembly tool to be provided as standard. I realise that a properly made pasta dough is typically dry and non-sticky, but to imagine that no small piece of it ever breaks off in the process is like believing in fairies.
Anyway, is there such a machine? A brand or model of pasta roller that comes apart easily for cleaning? I have tried the Googles, and they do nothing.
Some pasta rollers are indeed designed and manufactured to be disassembled for cleaning. Some, however, are not. And you are absolutely correct, you should never submerge the machine in water.
The woman I was dating before I met my now-wife was a first-generation child of Italian immigrants; I spent a lot of time in the kitchens of her family members (including in Italy). I learned how to make pasta from scratch, correctly, in a little Tuscan village. And when we were done, the owner cleaned the machine by brushing it down with a stiff-bristled tool, probed the rollers with a toothpick, and then ran one final blob of dough through to pick up the particles. And back in the cupboard it went. As far as I could tell, this machine, and every other machine I saw in these kitchens, had never been “properly” cleaned, over years and years and years.
Do you still have the original instruction manual? If the machine is made so the consumer can take it apart, the manual will say so. If the manual doesn’t explicitly provide for this, then I worry you might be risking breaking the machine by trying to unscrew things that you aren’t supposed to unscrew. For example, if there’s a spring that’s seated during manufacture, it could pop out and be impossible to replace.
I don’t have my pasta machine any more, but back when I had one, I would use a can of compressed air to blow the dust and stuff out of it. (You know, one of those cans with a narrow nozzle for blasting crumbs out of your computer keyboard.) Maybe give that a shot?
Edit to add: I went to the manufacturer’s website and found the instruction manual linked as a PDF. It says that parts of the mechanism do, in fact, snap out for cleaning purposes, but otherwise the machine doesn’t appear intended for disassembly. Maybe check the diagram before busting out the toolbox.
I have two, a manual and one that connects to a Kenwood mixer.
I just don’t clean them. I run a small piece of the current batch of dough through them on first pass. I discard that, it accumulates old waste. Then, with a pastry brush, add a little olive oil, and that’s all.
I have the manual; it says to brush out any flour and crumbs using a stiff brush. There are a couple of plastic panels on the underside that do pop out for partial cleaning, but there are still inaccessible cavities inside the machine where dough can (and clearly does) accumulate.
I would use our pasta machine much more often if it didn’t require hours to disassemble to clean.
I was an early adopter with our air fryer. The make/model was impossible to clean, so eventually I decided not to even try. Eventually an internal switch needed to be replaced. A year later when it failed again, I tossed the machine and got a different brand (Ninja) that reviewers rated highly for ease of cleaning. I love it!!!
I’ve given up on this one now - I could see pieces of dried dough stuck inside parts of the machine I can’t reach even with a dental pick. I put it in the scrap metal bin. I might look for an extruder instead, or just roll out by hand.
I have one for the Kitchen-Aid mixer. Never used an old plastic one that probably could be run through the dishwasher. I can brush out the Kitchen-Aid roller easily. Occasionally a dry crumb falls out if I shake it. I mainly make Semolina pasta with no eggs and that cleans up pretty easily.
I like this idea.
I have no answers, but feel your pain. At times I use a pasta roller for polymer clay and the accumulation of old clay and my inability to clear it out is extremely frustrating! My best attempts are with toothpicks. My worst attempts end up with colorful spatters on my latest and greatest projects.
I’m really surprised nobody seems to have made a machine that has tool-less disassembly as a feature. I can sort of visualise how it could be done, although I expect it could not be done nearly so cheaply as the diecast and stamped/pressed construction of the body of the Marcato machines - from the limited extent to which I was able to disassemble mine, it doesn’t look like it would take well to repeated disassembly and reassembly - things like screws tapped directly into pot-metal castings and rollers clipped into bushings seated in the same softish metal body. If it were to be knock-down-able, more of it would have to be machined from harder metal.