Pasta: The Basics

Let’s get one thing clear, right at the start: Marco Polo did not bring pasta back to Italy from China. That’s a myth—you could even call it a fib—that’s been around since 1929 when it was published in Macaroni Journal, an American trade magazine. When Marco returned to Italy from China in the year 1296, pasta had already been around the Italian peninsula and elsewhere in the Mediterranean for several centuries.

So what exactly is this product?

By definition, pasta is a supple, malleable dough of flour and water that can be either extruded through a press, or rolled out and cut; it is cooked by boiling in or steaming over water—that is, it’s not baked and it’s not fried. Theoretically, pasta can be made with almost any flour, but wheat flours are far and away the most typical. That’s because when wheat flour and water are mixed together, gluten develops, and it’s gluten that gives dough elasticity and extensibility, two characteristics that are fundamental for both bread and pasta.

Like its sister product bread, pasta would seem to be almost inevitable whenever and wherever people are working with flour and water to make dough. In fact, we would hazard a guess that pasta may well have developed when some enterprising baker had the bright idea of dropping pieces of bread dough into boiling water to see what would happen. And what happened, after a few tries, was pasta, similar to bread dough but without the yeast leavening that makes bread dough expand.

There are many different kinds of pasta in Italy, but basically it boils down to two subcategories, northern and southern. The northern tradition is fresh pasta, pasta fresca, made by hand, from soft wheat flour, the Italian equivalent of all-purpose, and water, with eggs added (often indeed a great quantity of eggs) to strengthen the dough, and intended to be cooked and eaten soon after it is made. The southern tradition is for dry pasta, pasta secca, the dough made of hard durum wheat flour (semola or semolina) and water, usually with no addition of egg, extruded mechanically and boxed or bagged, stored, and sold as dried pasta. That southern tradition is what has become the nearly universal Italian dish.

That being said, we have to add that, as with most things Italian, this is not an absolute. In Italy there is an exception to every rule. In Tuscany, a traditional stringlike pasta called pici is made with soft flour and water, no eggs, and rolled out by hand. And traditional cooks make fresh pasta with durum flour and water, like Puglia’s orecchiette. One summer morning we watched Stefania Peduzzi as she made pasta alla chitarra for her extended family. Stefania, with her brother Gianluigi, owns the Rustichella d’Abruzzo pasta factory in the Abruzzese town of Pianella. But she often makes pasta by hand, mixing durum flour (farina di grano duro) with eggs and water to make a soft, tender, easily worked dough. Rolled out on a board, the sheet of dough is then set on top of a chitarra, a wooden box with wires strung from one end to the other, like a primitive guitar (for which it is named). Stefania deftly spins a rolling pin across to push the dough down between the wires, making long shapes that look like spaghetti but are square in section. (See the recipe for pasta alla chitarra, here.)

You could argue for days about where or when pasta was invented—and people do just that—but one fact stands out: Italians unquestionably have adopted it and embraced it with passionate conviction, to the extent that pasta today is the single most defining element in the Italian diet. Ask about Italian food almost anywhere in the world and back will come the response: “Spaghetti.” (Or “pizza”—but that is a different story.) Not only that, but Italians took the pasta concept and ran with it, teased it out, played it for all it was worth, creating not dozens, not hundreds, but possibly thousands of the most sustaining, intriguing, and delightful dishes imaginable.

Such was not always the case, however. Neapolitans early on became known as mangia maccheroni, but it took time for the epithet “macaroni eaters” to spread throughout the entire country. Today Italy happily consumes annually something like 57 pounds of industrially produced* pasta secca per capita, but up until well after the middle of the last century, the consumption of factorymade pasta in the north was almost exclusively an urban, working class phenomenon. In the countryside, and even in northern cities like Florence, bread was the basic carbohydrate. Housewives prided themselves on handmade, homemade, egg-rich pasta, but for special occasions only, not as an everyday treat. Our own village, deep in the mountains between Tuscany and Umbria, is typical and illustrates the reasons behind this. Even in the early 1970s when we stumbled on the place, there were few cars; motor scooters and the little three-wheeled farm-to-market vehicles called Ape were the only mechanized means of transport. Going to town was a major expedition, and returning home again, on mule back or in the bus that wound its way twice a day across the mountains to our village, one would be laden with the kinds of goods that were simply unavailable in Teverina—salt, sugar, black pepper, and other spices for curing pork, tools, seeds, grain, coffee, and other vitals. There was no room in the market basket for boxes of commercial pasta secca, not when there was good bread at home baked in the farmhouse oven. Bread was the staple and pasta was a luxury—and it was that way for many Italian families.

Gianluigi Peduzzi confirmed that for us when we visited him at the pastificio in Pianella, near Pescara, where he and his sister are the third generation of their family to make Rustichella d’Abruzzo, one of a number of artisanal pasta producers—a number that seems to grow each year. “It was an elite product until very recently,” he said of his own family’s production. This surprised us until we thought of our neighbors for whom it would indeed have been an elite and expensive addition to the family table.

What changed all that? First, of course, industrialization, which brought down the price of pasta and, not coincidentally, drove many of the small pasta producers out of business, superseded by the likes of Barilla and Buitoni (the latter now part of Nestlé).

But another contributor to the market surge was actual physical access to the market. With the development of a strong national system of highways and railways, and with the growth of the economy to the point that every Italian family could own a car for driving to town, pasta secca became a mainstay in every kitchen in Italy. So: a stronger economy, a cheaper and more widely available product, expedited access to markets for both the producer and the consumer, all of this led to pasta finally becoming a truly national product. And, of course, pasta is a great way to feed a lot of people: If you have only a kilo of meat, and you’ve got ten people sitting around the table, what better way to extend that kilo than by turning it into a meaty ragù with vegetables and serving it over a bowl of spaghetti?

Today pasta secca is not just common but fundamental on the Italian table. Where once it was for the elite, and later for the working class, now pasta secca is for everyone. Except in a few regions of the north, Italians don’t bother much with pasta fresca at all. For everyday meals—and most Italians eat pasta at least once a day—whether in high-priced Milanese restaurants or humble Tuscan farmhouses, Italian cooks rely on the stuff in the box. And they don’t apologize for it, either.

There’s a myth in America that the best pasta is always made with eggs and soft flour, hand-rolled into a broad and delicate sheet so thin you can read a newspaper through it. That’s wonderful pasta sfoglia, pasta fresca as made in Bologna by experts, almost all of them women, called sfogline. It is one of the glories of the Italian table. We love it too, and we’ve included recipes for making fresh pasta, from simple sheets for oven-baked lasagna to more complex filled pastas such as ravioli and agnolotti.

But most Italians rarely eat pasta sfoglia, and southern Italians almost never. Indeed, if you sit down with an Italian at one (or more) of the 260 pasta meals that, according to statistics, he or she will consume in a year, you will most likely sit down to a plate of pasta secca, store-bought pasta made in a factory and sold in a box or a bag. Pasta secca is the backbone of the Italian table and it’s the kind of pasta we cook, day in and day out, for ourselves and our families. Almost all the recipes in this book are about that kind of pasta. It’s what we reach for when we’re tired, or when we have unexpected guests to feed, or when we’re challenged by an unfamiliar ingredient, or just when we want something really good and easy and substantial. “Butta la pasta!” we say, along with millions of Italians at mealtime, “Throw the pasta into the water and let’s eat!”

Italian law requires that commercial pasta be made from hard wheat (durum) semola or semolina,* which is generally richer in gluten and protein than softer bread wheat or all-purpose flour. Since other countries are more lenient in their requirements, for the best pasta we invariably buy Italian made. It could be one of the big industrial Italian pasta makers, such as De Cecco, Delverde, or Barilla. These are all commercial pastas. But in recent years, like discerning cooks and pasta lovers in Italy, we have turned away from big industrial pasta makers, instead seeking out smaller firms, usually family owned and multigenerational, that have been tagged as artisanal.

So just what does artisanal mean? There are two major differences that distinguish artisanal pasta makers from major conventional producers such as Barilla and Buitoni. They are:

Pasta is extruded through bronze dies that have a rougher surface than conventional Teflon-coated dies; this microscopic roughness transfers to the surface of the pasta and allows it to bond and meld more closely with the sauce.

Pasta is dried at low temperatures for a longer period of time; conventional pasta is produced and dried quickly. You can see this in the sleek, polished, amber-colored surface of the pasta itself, while artisanal pasta has a visibly rougher surface and paler color, as well as more of the nutty flavor and aroma of durum wheat.

There’s no danger that Barilla will go out of business, however. Wherever the subject of pasta comes up, Barilla, the largest-selling pasta brand in the world, is the elephant in the room, responsible for more than 40 percent of the Italian market—and about 25 percent of the U.S. market. That amazing company, still tightly controlled by the Barilla family from its headquarters in Parma, continues to dominate the market, processing an incredible 1.4 million tons of durum wheat semolina in a year—almost all of which goes into pasta production. Nonetheless, increasing interest in the Mediterranean diet has given new life to artisanal producers such as those we list next.

There are many fine artisanal pasta makers in Italy; among our favorites, all available in North America, are:

Bionaturae, organic whole wheat from Tuscany

Benedetto Cavalieri, from Maglie in Puglia

Cav. Giuseppe Cocco, from Fara San Martino in the Abruzzo

Pastificio Faella, from Gragnano, southeast of Naples

Martelli, from western Tuscany near Pisa

Pastificio G. Di Martino, also from Gragnano

Pastificio Masciarelli, from the Abruzzo

Rustichella d’Abruzzo, from Pescara in the Abruzzo

Pasta Setaro, from Torre Annunziata, southeast of Naples

What should you look for if you can’t find one of these brands? Note that all of these listed are actually sold online at www.amazon.com, as well as in many fine retail outlets, including Whole Foods. But if you happen not to find any of the above, look for a label stating the pasta is “artisanally made,” or “made with bronze dyes,” or some equivalent language. The biggest clue is in the texture and color of the pasta: Pasta made this way will have a slightly rough exterior texture from the bronze dies, and a pale, creamy color, the result of being dried at low temperatures that do not cook the wheat to a rich, toasted gold. Golden pasta with a slightly shiny surface might be very good—but it is not artisanally made.

Increasingly, we have had opportunities to sample artisanal pastas made in the United States. Two brands have been standouts—Della Terra from Oklahoma City (www.dellaterrapasta.com) and Baia (www.baiapasta.com) from Oakland, California—and we hope there will be others to add to this list in the future. Just as American-made wine, bread, and olive oil have taken tremendous strides toward excellence in recent years, so we expect to see more and more high-quality production of artisanal pasta, produced with American-grown durum wheat, in the years to come.

As for whole wheat pasta, traditionally, it has not been significant on Italian tables, although that may be changing as producers of fine artisanal pasta turn their attention to whole wheat products, and as nutritionists continue to signal the benefits of whole grains in a healthy diet. We’re all for healthy diets, but we confess that we tread a bit gingerly when it comes to whole wheat pasta, primarily because much of what we’ve tried is quite strong in flavor, which interferes with the marriage of pasta and sauce. Another drawback we’ve also found is that, even with attention paid, it’s difficult to cook most whole wheat pasta to the supple, tender-with-a-bite, al dente stage that a good pasta cook demands. Too much of it ends up as a gluey, sticky mess.

That said, we have found certain brands to be more than acceptable. Among them are Rustichella d’Abruzzo, Di Martino, and Benedetto Cavalieri, venerable companies with their whole wheat brands available in U.S. retail stores. Barilla also makes good whole wheat pasta, as does another Italian, Bionaturae, also widely available in North American markets. Whole wheat pasta in Italian is called pasta integrale—look for those words on the package.

And what about gluten-free? Gluten-free is every bit as modish in Italy as it is in America, and it is just as difficult in Italy as it is in America to understand how a product that has nourished people around the globe for about ten thousand years has suddenly become toxic. That said, if you are one of the hundreds of thousands who feel better when not consuming gluten, you perhaps had better swear off pasta. We don’t believe that pasta made from lentils, corn, or quinoa can actually be pasta. But we do know that many of the sauces and ragùs in our recipes will taste just as good served over gluten-free polenta (made from corn, polenta is naturally free of gluten) instead.

A more serious question for nutritionists is the glycemic index of pasta, and there we are on more solid ground. (Glycemic index [GI] is a way of measuring the effects of carbohydrates on glucose levels; high glucose levels provoke an insulin response.) Foods that take longer to digest generally have a lower GI than those that are quickly digested, thus pasta cooked al dente has a lower GI than pasta cooked until it is very soft. Durum wheat is digested more slowly than regular wheat. And the GI can change depending on what you put on the pasta when you serve it—pasta and beans, pasta with tomato sauce, pasta with ragù, pasta with olive oil, chili peppers, and anchovies—all react differently, but all will have a lower GI, in other words, a more healthful profile, than plain, unadorned pasta.