Use a pasta machine to make dumpling wrappers

Adam Jones

Personally

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10 August 202610 August 2026

Against Malena's advice, I tried using the pasta machine to roll out dumpling wrappers.

This actually turned out really well. After a bunch of experimentation, the process we settled on is:

1. Make 2cm-diameter dough balls.
2. Flatten each one with the base of your hand into a disc, maybe 3–4mm thick.
3. Put the disc through the machine on thickness setting 4. You'll get an oblong.²

   Settings 4 and 7 are for my machine. I feel like many pasta machines seem to have roughly similar settings, but all the numbers seem made up, so it might be that you need to figure out what settings are appropriate for your machine.

   You also might want to vary the thickness depending on how wet your sauce is.

4. Rotate it 90° and put it through again on setting 7. Now it's roughly a circle.²

   Settings 4 and 7 are for my machine. I feel like many pasta machines seem to have roughly similar settings, but all the numbers seem made up, so it might be that you need to figure out what settings are appropriate for your machine.

   You also might want to vary the thickness depending on how wet your sauce is.

5. Fill, fold in half along the line of symmetry, and pleat the edges.

Also: consider clamping your pasta machine down with a bar clamp.

Things that worked less well

We tried a few different things until we came up with this process:

• Rolling the dough into sheets then cutting them:

  • Cutting out circles is kinda hard. Possibly a round cookie cutter might work though.
  • Cutting squares/rectangles are then surprisingly hard to fold. You might expect it to be fine because they have an axis of symmetry. But I think something about the folded rectangle or square shape puts a lot of pressure around the edges.

• Trying to go through in a single pass: This basically always gets you really wonky oblong shapes, that are also not great for folding into dumplings.

  If you do get slightly oblong shapes, I think the better thing is to fold it on the longer axis of symmetry, i.e. so the distance from the folded edge to the crimped edge is smaller.