Philips Kitchen Appliances Compact Pasta and Noodle Maker, Viva Collection, Comes with 3 Default Classic Pasta Shaping Discs, Fully Automatic, Recipe Book, Small, White (HR2370/05)

Excelente el envío
Excelente todo … el envío impecable … y todo perfecto … agradecida

Good if it lasts
What a crazy mess my first experience was! I’m surprised nobody else I can find mentioned the poor instructions in the black & white booklet that gives the wrong units of measurement for the egg/liquid ingredients. Instead of ml, like it’s marked on the included measuring cup, the manual’s written instructions labels the liquid in g, aka grams. I was thrown off by it and blame it in part for not getting good results the first try using semolina combined with whole wheat flour.I forgot to double the amount of egg & water to the 400 g doubled flour amount. It called for 150 g semolina and 50 g white flour. Liquid measure was supposed to read, 75 ml after you add 1 egg and top the liquid up to make it that amount. Double that would have been 150 ml. Instead, I was tearing my hair out wondering why it said to add grams instead of ml. My husband was probably right when he told me at that point that I shouldn’t have drunk any of the whiskey he had just brought home from a trip out to the local liquor store. lolI ended up with a big ball of dough that I knew, from past experience with an old machine I used to own, was too wet. I had to stop & rethink everything. I didn’t want to throw all that dough & egg away. I decided to split it into 2 halves & add another 100 g of flour, acc. to the included dry ingredients measuring cup, to each of the 2 separate batches I was about to remix.I didn’t have white AP flour I could use for adding to the dough. A few days prior, the new bag I just recently bought at the grocery store had a worm in the top when I opened it. I had to throw the whole bag away! I didn’t know I had another bag of white flour in storage until after I finished making the pasta in this machine! I found some bread flour I had in storage and added that in place of the white AP flour to the over-moist semolina dough mixtures.Somehow miraculously, it all worked out and I was able to extrude 2 good batches of pasta when all was said and done! FYI, I liked very much that the machine automatically went back to remixing the dough left in the machine so that it could extrude more of it out. But even after that, there was still residual dough left in it that it was unable to pick up and push through the extruder.The solution: take it out of the machine and push it back into the rectangular opening where the screw turning mechanism pushes it through to get it to extrude it. When you’ve done this enough times and you still have a small amount of dough left, make it into noodles by hand. Stretch it out between the palms of your hands and roll it into round noodle shapes. Having been a pottery artist for many years, this is very easy for me but I don’t think it’s hard for anyone to do.Another thing I had fun doing was pushing out the “buttons” of pasta dough that gets stuck in the dies, and cooking them in with the rest of the past without changing their shapes. You can reshape them if you want. And you can do the same with any and all the little bits of dough that gets left out.If you really want to get into it & you’ve made a bigger mistake that leaves a larger quantity of unextruded dough, you can get out your rolling pin. Roll the dough out into a flat sheet. Then cut it in noodle-shape slices. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!Another issue I had with the instructions is how it says to place the die on the opening by putting the non-existent arrow at the top. There are lines in die opposite each other but they don’t end up centered at the top if you push the die in firmly enough so that its little teeth fit into slots on the machine end that hold the die in place. This was very confusing. I didn’t know if I should keep the die loose and not push it into the machine or push it hard enough to make the teeth mesh with the gaps molded in on the machine. Very hard to describe the problem but if you’ve tried this, I think you’ll know what I’m talking about.Positives- I like the improvements they’ve made to this type of machine such as the built-in storage drawer on the bottom. The whole process being automatic from mixing to extruding is very nice. It’s nice and compact which is a big reason I bought this instead of the larger model. The scraper with metal rods built in at both ends is very handy for poking dough out of the holes in the dies when they need cleaning or if you need to clear a few holes while it extrudes and they get plugged up.Can’t wait to try this again with a better start the next time we want to eat pasta. Not sure if this machine’s motor is strong enough for it to last. I bought the added coverage in case it breaks down. I also bought the extra dies elsewhere that will fit this machine & await their arrival so that I can try them out.

I’ve had a couple of pasta makers over the past 20 odd years which broke/cracked after not too many uses and I lost faith in these home made machines. However when I saw the Philips compact Viva machine on sale for a good price I figured I’d give it a go. The first thing I noticed taking it out of the box was how heavy it felt and it seemed very well constructed. So far I’ve used it six times in about 3 weeks and the results have been excellent. Noticeably it’s not noisy compared to the previous machines I had, a big plus. After reading the instruction I noticed in a couple of places that they recommend weighing your ingredients rather than using the provided measuring cups so that’s what I did. They should highlight that more boldly in my opinion. All you need is an inexpensive digital scale for accuracy. It takes about 15 minutes from start to finish and cleanup is very simple. This machine unlike my others doesn’t leave much residual dough in the hopper at all, very surprising. Just take it apart and let all the pieces sit for 30 to 60 minutes and any remaining bits of dough flour just wipe off with a paper towel. There’s a provided scraper with pins on the end for poking dough out of any holes that still have remnants in them. Very happy with this machine and hope to get a lot of years usage out of it.

This is the second time we buy this machine. There is a part that is wore out after 6 years and I cannot find the part even on Philip’s website. The machine is easy to use and easy to clean, the past it makes is better than we anywhere we can get.