A Quick Guide to Extruded Pasta Dough

Extruded pasta — think spaghetti, bucatini, rigatoni made the industrial way — works on a different principle than hand-shaped or filled pasta, and it starts with a very different dough. Here's the short version of what makes it distinct.

Ingredients

• Semolina flour

• Water (around 40% of your flour weight — see below)

The key difference: low hydration

Most pasta dough is worked at 50% hydration or higher, giving you a smooth, elastic dough you can knead and roll by hand. Extrusion needs the opposite: a low-hydration dough, closer to 40g of water per 100g of semolina. At this ratio, the mixture won't look like a dough at all — it stays crumbly, closer to wet sand than anything you'd knead.

This isn't a mistake to correct. Too much hydration risks clogging the extruder's internal mechanism, so resist the urge to add extra water even if it looks too dry to work with by hand.

Working with it

Rather than kneading, crumble the mixture and press small handfuls into walnut-sized balls in your palm, then feed those into the extruder. The result is pasta with a distinctly textured surface — exactly what you want, since that texture is what helps sauce cling once it's cooked.

A note on this one

Extrusion is a fun technique to know, but it requires a more specialized setup than the other tools we cover here, and not something we currently stock. If you're extrusion-curious, this should be enough to get a first batch right — for everything else, our hand-shaping and filled pasta guides cover tools we can actually point you toward.

Explore our other pasta guides →