How Is Pasta Made? Durum, Dies and Why the Shape Matters
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Italy makes about 3.5 million tonnes of pasta a year and eats 23 kilograms of it per person, and almost all of it is made from two things, durum wheat semolina and water, forced through a shaped hole and dried. The simplicity is deceptive. The wheat has to be a particular species, the drying takes up to a day at temperatures chosen to the degree, and the shapes, of which there are several hundred, exist because sauce clings differently to a tube, a ribbon and a spiral. The story that Marco Polo brought it from China is a twentieth-century invention; the Romans ate a form of it, and the Arabs of Sicily were drying it for export by 1154.
The wheat
Dried pasta is made from durum, Triticum durum, a hard wheat with a high protein content whose endosperm, when milled coarsely, gives a yellow semolina rather than a white flour. The hardness matters: durum's proteins form a strong, elastic gluten network when hydrated, which holds the starch in place as the pasta cooks so that it stays firm, al dente, and does not turn to mush, while soft bread wheat makes a pasta that goes sticky. Italian law requires dried pasta to be made from durum alone, and Italy imports much of it from Canada and Australia. Fresh pasta, the tagliatelle and ravioli of the north, is a different food, made from soft wheat flour and eggs, rolled and cut, and eaten within a day or two or frozen.
The process
A pasta factory runs a sequence that has not changed in principle since the nineteenth century:
- •Mixing: semolina and about a third its weight of water are kneaded under vacuum into a stiff dough; the vacuum removes air bubbles that would leave white specks and weak points
- •Extrusion: the dough is forced by a screw through a die, a thick plate pierced with holes of the shape wanted, and cut by a rotating knife as it emerges; a bronze die drags on the dough and gives a rough, porous surface that holds sauce, a Teflon-lined die gives a smooth, shiny one and is cheaper and faster
- •Drying: the wet pasta is dried in chambers from 30 percent moisture to 12, over 6 to 24 hours; slow, cool drying at around 50 degrees preserves flavour and texture, fast drying at 80 to 100 sets the surface and is what most mass-market pasta gets
- •Cutting and packing: long shapes are hung over rods and cut to length, short shapes fall onto belts
Why the shapes
The several hundred shapes are not decoration; each is engineered for a sauce. Long thin strands, spaghetti and linguine, suit sauces that coat, oil, tomato, clam; ribbons, tagliatelle and pappardelle, with their wide surface, take rich meat sauces; tubes, penne and rigatoni, ridged to hold sauce on the outside and hollow to trap it inside, suit chunky sauces; shells and orecchiette cup small pieces; and spirals, fusilli, hold thick sauces in their grooves. The regional pattern follows the wheat and the wealth, with egg pasta in the north where eggs were plentiful and dried durum pasta in the south, where the climate dried it and the poor could store it. A recipe's pairing of shape and sauce, which Italians treat as a matter of correctness, is a folk record of what sticks to what.
Cooking it
Cooking is hydration and the gelatinisation of starch: the pasta absorbs water, the starch granules swell and soften, and the gluten holds the structure, and the moment to stop is when the centre is just firm, since the pasta goes on cooking in the sauce. The physics explains the rules. Plenty of water and a rolling boil keep the pieces apart and the temperature up; salt in the water seasons the pasta from inside, since it will not take salt afterwards; oil in the water does nothing but coat the pasta so sauce slides off; and the starchy cooking water, which Italian cooks add to the sauce, is an emulsifier that binds oil and water into a coating. Al dente pasta also has a lower glycaemic index than soft-cooked, since the intact structure slows digestion, and pasta cooled and reheated has more resistant starch still.
History and myth
The Etruscans and Romans made sheets of dough and cut them, a dish Horace and Cicero mention, and the Greek word for it, laganon, is the root of lasagne. Dried pasta, which needs durum and a dry climate, appears in the Arab Mediterranean, and the geographer al-Idrisi wrote in 1154 of itriyya, strings of dried dough, being made at Trabia in Sicily and shipped by the boatload. Naples industrialised it in the eighteenth century, with the dough kneaded by foot and dried in the sea breeze, and the mechanical press of the 1870s and the artificial dryer of 1917 made it the food of every kitchen; Italian emigrants took it to America, where the tomato sauce it is now inseparable from was standardised. Marco Polo's supposed introduction from China was printed in an American trade magazine in 1929, two years after the same magazine had published the Sicilian evidence, and the noodle of China is a separate and older invention, made of soft wheat and pulled or cut, that the two civilisations reached without each other's help.
The takeaway
Dried pasta is durum wheat semolina and water, kneaded under vacuum, extruded through a bronze or Teflon die into one of several hundred shapes and dried slowly to twelve percent moisture, with the hard wheat's gluten holding the starch so that it cooks firm; fresh pasta is soft flour and egg, rolled and cut. The shapes are matched to sauces by how they hold them, the cooking rules follow from starch and gluten, and the food is Roman, Arab and Sicilian long before it was Neapolitan, and never Chinese.