Pasta Triticum durum
Salt the water heavily, drain a minute early, finish the cooking in the sauce.
2 recipes on this site
In the kitchen
Under heat
Starch on the surface releases into the cooking water, which is what makes that water useful for finishing a sauce.
Against air
Cooked pasta left uncovered dries and clumps as the surface starch sets — a little oil or sauce tossed through prevents it.
In storage
Dry pasta keeps almost indefinitely in a sealed container; cooked pasta is a two-to-three day fridge item, not longer.
At the shop
Shape should match the sauce — long strands for smooth sauces, ridged or tubular shapes for anything chunky that needs to cling.
Which variety, for what
- Long strands (spaghetti, linguine)
- Best with smooth, oil- or cream-based sauces that coat rather than cling.
- Short, ridged, or tubular shapes (penne, rigatoni, fusilli)
- Built to trap chunkier sauces in the ridges and hollows.
Beyond the kitchen
BRONZE DIES MATTER
Pasta extruded through bronze dies comes out rough and slightly pale; Teflon dies give a smooth, glossy surface. The rough texture holds sauce measurably better, and bronze-drawn pasta is usually labelled as such because it costs more to make.
MARCO POLO DID NOT BRING IT
The story is a twentieth-century invention, traced to an American trade magazine in the 1920s. Pasta is documented in Sicily well before Polo's return in 1295 — an Arab geographer describes a thriving dried-pasta industry there in 1154.
THE SPAGHETTI TREE
The BBC's Panorama broadcast a straight-faced report on the Swiss spaghetti harvest on April Fool's Day 1957, complete with footage of women picking strands from trees. Enough viewers wrote in asking how to grow their own that it became the most famous television hoax ever made.
SHAPES ARE ENGINEERING
There are several hundred named shapes and the differences are functional: ridges and hollows for thick sauces, thin strands for oil-based ones, small shapes for soup. Italian regional cooking pairs specific shapes with specific sauces as a rule, not a preference.
A longer history
Dried pasta made from durum wheat is documented in Sicily by the twelfth century, when the geographer al-Idrisi described an established industry at Trabia exporting it by ship. Durum wheat, which grows well in hot dry Mediterranean conditions and produces the hard semolina that dried pasta requires, had arrived through Arab agriculture in Sicily.
Fresh pasta and dried pasta developed as distinct traditions — fresh with soft wheat and eggs in the north of Italy, dried with durum and water in the south. Naples became the centre of industrial dried pasta production from the seventeenth century, helped by a climate suited to open-air drying and, later, by mechanical extrusion.
Mass Italian emigration in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries took pasta worldwide and produced whole new cuisines in the process — Italian-American cooking above all, which is a genuine tradition rather than a corruption of anything. Italy remains the largest producer and consumer per head, and pasta is now among the most widely eaten prepared foods on earth.
