Any suggestions on brands of quality hard pasta?

I often buy Rustichella d'Abruzzo.

Here is a link to the what the packaging looks like (from Amazon).

You can most often tell quality dried pasta from cheaper brands, simply by looking at them. Quality pasta looks a bit rough and is sort of powdery white.

The ones that we find in the average grocery store will all be teflon?

I am guessing that you are asking if most of the pasta that you find in the grocery store is made with teflon dyes? If this is your question, then yes is the answer.

However these days more and more grocery stores are also carrying a few varieties of quality pastas as well.

Hello, Martha Stewart recommended Maestri Pastai and had their representative on her show; he was proud to describe how they use traditional brass extrusion from very old brass plates. I tried several varieties, it is great. It does have the whiter shade and rough surfaces for grabbing the sauce, as described in the lessons. It was very reasonably priced also, I bought it at www.ilovepastashop.com. The home website for the manufacturer in Italy is http://www.maestripastaiusa.com/products.html

Does anyone has experience doing extruded pasta with a Kitchenaid? I tried using the pasta maker plates (KA attachment - http://www.kitchenaid.com/flash.cmd?/#/product/SNPA/)but it doesn't work quite well; I started making the dougth with the dougth attachment and then I extruded with the plates, but I feel it was too hard for the machine. Any suggestion?

I have not used the KitchenAid attachment but it sounds like the dough may not have had enough moisture.

You may want to add a touch more water. For more discussion on this see the forum discussion under Making Laminated Pasta. Cheers!

This week I decided to try an experiment. I really didn't believe there would be much difference between the pasta extruded through teflon dies and that extruded through metal.

I searched for a pasta extruded with brass dies. I looked in several supermarkets and was unable to find any. I finally found some at a store that carried food gift items. It was labeled as extruded through bronze dies.

I cooked the standard supermarket variety for lunch using Rouxbe's Spaghetti Aglio e Olio recipe. My family informed me that they didn't want to have that dish again any time soon! I had to agree with them. It was bland and somewhat oily.

Imagine their surprise when they got the same dish again for dinner! Only this time I prepared it with the higher quality pasta. Oh my goodness what a difference it made! It seemed that the pasta was covered with a delicious, creamy sauce! The oil emulsified well and the flavor difference was huge! My family voted that they would happily eat that dish again.

It is amazing to me that the same ingredients can produce such different results based primarily on the way they were extruded! While it make take quite a bit of searching to find the higher quality pasta it is definitely worth the effort and cost!

I am so happy to hear that Carolyn and good for you for performing that experiment — that is certainly the sign of an excellent cook!