Somewhere in Italy, a visibly distressed Nonna is wondering what’s wrong with the world!

The Parola Pasta machine is a unique combination of a pasta-maker and your old-fashioned printing press. Designed by Nikita Nietzke, a student at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design), Parola Pasta reinvents one of the world’s most famous food categories, bringing automation in a new form to it. Modeled on the kind of machine Johannes Gutenberg developed in the 15th century, the Parola Pasta lets you extrude pasta dough in any alphabetical design. The machine uses a set of extruder plates that can be placed together to create words, and then after that it’s all about creating the alphabet-soup-equivalent of pasta!

The machine is hand-cranked (although that can easily be automated) and requires you to manually cut the pasta shape out at intervals. The pasta is then laid out on a wooden tray which automatically moves to make space for the next pasta piece. The tray docks in the Parola Pasta machine’s base, letting you dry it out for future use. The machine could, in theory, work with any kind of dough, allowing you to used colored pasta (spinach or beetroot) or even make things interesting by popping in some cookie dough instead! An ‘AMORE’ shaped cookie would definitely hit the sweet spot, wouldn’t it?

Designer: Nikita Neitzke