One of my favorite food rants (usually a few drinks deep) used to be a diatribe against pasta, damning it as a character-less, lazy backdrop for a sauce. These hazy memories are a good lesson in humility, as having since seen the light and turned away from my pasta-less past.

Now, I still cling to my belief that most pasta is pretty bad. But I was far too sloppy, skewed by a few years of our college cafeteria’s pasta, overcooked and wilting under hotbar lights then doused-to-order with your choice of sauce (red or white).

There’s nothing wrong with loving this kind of pasta. But I think we can be frank: it’s not exactly elegant. Globs of sauce slipping freely off wet noodles. Pasta that doesn’t need teeth to enjoy. A bad postmodern painting of water and sauce droplets pooling at the bottom of your plate.

But I am hesitant, especially in these times, to say that you’re missing out by not shelling out top dollar for a certain product. So many of our food dollars are spent rewarding good marketing, or voting for the food system we want to participate in (or both!). But I believe pasta is special, the rare food where an extra dollar per serving truly improves the quality of your dish.

So In this post, let’s take a deeper dive into what makes bad pasta bad, and great pasta great.

Dried Pasta Explained

Dried pasta is conventionally a mix of semolina flour and water. While the basics of dried pasta are pretty consistent (knead it, extrude it, dry it), small differences in the production method have big impacts for home cooking. They’re also not too complex and visible right from the grocery shelf.

To help understand your options and decide between the €1.50 and €5 brands, we’ll focus on the details of two steps in manufacturing dried pasta: extrusion and drying.

Pasta Extrusion

After mixing, the dough consists of swollen starch granules surrounded by a matrix of gluten. Most mass-produced pastas are mixed through a chamber with a gigantic corkscrew in the middle, resulting in a strong, but chaotic gluten network. Extruding the pasta is where that gluten is coaxed to give the final shape strength.

The high-pressure point where the pasta exits the extruder (and is cut to length) is key to the surface which comes into contact with both cooking water and sauces. A major fork in the road between sad and incredible pasta is the specific material of that extrusion.

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The classic extruded pastas are forced through a bronze disc, which is just adhesive enough to shear the outside of the dough, creating countless tiny rips in the surface of the pasta. Tearing up the surface of the extruded pasta rips up that gluten matrix and exposes the starch. When you later cook the dried pasta, that exposed starch is quick to jump into the cooking water.

Alternatively, many modern machines are coated in a thin layer of teflon (as in the gif), which keeps the dough moving quickly, but also pushes the dough through the die with almost no friction. The resulting pasta is squeezed seamlessly through without any tearing, instead stretching the gluten network through the die. This results in a long, tight gluten network enveloping the starch granules. This pasta then hardly releases any starch during cooking and remains slippery and smooth afterwards.

After extrusion, the pasta heads into some kind of drying chamber, where the differences between pastas really heat up.

Drying

Pasta, like most anything else, dries faster at warmer temperatures. The first dried pastas would be dried for 1-4 weeks in the heat of Naples. Only in the 20th century did technology support faster, industrial drying at higher temperatures, going up to 75C / 170F to cut a weekslong step to a half day.

The acceleration of drying time didn’t stop there, and in the last 40 years, producers have pushed drying temps to over 95C / 200F to dry pasta within a few short hours. Quite a rapid change for a traditional food!

The incentive to dry faster and hotter is clear — producers can make pasta faster. But what else changes in the process?

Color: going from low-temperature (50C / 120 F) to ultrahigh (95C / 200 F) temperatures increases yellowness from 5-10%.
Proteins: higher-temperature pastas have a tighter gluten network and more degraded proteins and amino acids (which may decrease their nutritional value).
Texture: higher-temperature pastas are less sticky when cooked due to their tighter protein network which protects the pasta’s starch.
Flour Quality: The higher temperatures also have allowed the use of lower quality, lower-protein flour as the heat makes for a firm, consistent final product which hides its quality.

So generally, a higher-temperature pasta is yellower, denser, and more slippery. This combines with and reinforces that teflon-extruded pastas are tighter and smoother. Drying temperature and extruding material are intertwined, with higher-volume manufacture favoring silicon dies and high-temperature drying.

Here’s a picture showing a bronze-extruded, low-temperature pasta from Faella vs penne from the world’s largest pasta producer, Barilla:

Note the craggy, crackly surface and paler color of the Faella — the result of a bronze extruder and slow drying, versus the wax-smooth finish of the Barilla. Another way to view how consistent and long the gluten of the Barilla pasta is is to simply smash a piece. The Faella, with its more chaotic and torn gluten crumbles more irregularly, while the Barilla cracks in long, straight lines along the pasta’s shape.

That’s why different pastas look and feel the way they do — but what does this mean for dinner?

Cooking

The shorn, rough outer surface of bronze pasta is visible right from the package, with the surface of the pasta displaying a dusty-looking, uneven exterior loaded with tiny rips and pulls. Those inconsistencies are torn gluten strands and exposed starch, which are more likely to jump out of the pasta and into the cooking liquid.

On the other hand, the “teflon” pasta is perfectly smooth from the coated extruder (meaning tight external gluten) and darker yellow from the higher temperature drying. The teflon pasta also takes a bit longer to cook (11 vs 9 min, even for a smaller penne) as the dense, smooth pasta takes longer for water to penetrate. That also makes for a mushier exterior, as it’s had much longer exposure to the cooking liquid.

The below photo shows cooking liquid from bronze and teflon pasta, cooked in identical ratio by mass and according to the package’s instructions. Even with the shorter cooking time and smaller surface area, it’s clear that the bronze pasta (left) turned the cooking water milky-white with starch.

While generally we want to reduce the ‘cooking losses’ of food and keep the good stuff in the food itself, the starchy salty cooking liquid is a miracle for building a great sauce, and sticking it to the pasta.

Sauce Adhesion

Kitchen emulsions and sauces are usually fats dispersed in water. We know these two things don’t like to mingle, but emulsifiers like protein or starch can surround the fats and / or thicken the water such that they remain together. In mayonnaise, for example, proteins from egg yolk surround oils and shield the oil from the water with their polar heads. By beating (vigorously), you break the oils into smaller and smaller protein-shielded blobs and thicken the mixture.

In many pasta sauces, you’re usually adding starchy water into fat (be it from pork, oil, butter, cheese). With a bit of swirling, the starch starts to encapsulate the fats and bring the cooking water and fats together. In addition to starchier water having more starch to surround fat, the thicker cooking water also breaks up the fat clusters as they move through the starch, tearing them apart while trying to swim through the thick liquid.

So, bronze pasta (and cooking in less water) means smoother, easier emulsified sauces like Carbonara, Cacio e Pepe, or Aglio e Olio. But even beyond emulsified sauces, a slight emulsification occurs with sauces like marinara or bolognese, and will cling better to your pasta as a result.

The rougher, looser exterior of bronze pastas also helps the sauce remain on the noodle. The below picture captures this with the higher-quality Faella pasta on the left. It’s subtle, but note the splotchy coverage and runoff on the Barilla pasta on the right.

Buying Guide

Brand vary tremendously so specific recommendations are tricky, but you’re generally looking for a paler, rougher pasta that specifically mentions its drying temperature or time. Here are a few common brands with their process and quality:

Martelli: 36°C for 50+ hours (Excellent)
Pasta Mancini: Below 55°C for 24-44 hours (Excellent)
Faella: labels drying temp of 48°C for 24 - 60 hours (Excellent)
De Ceccco: labels drying time from 9 - 36 hours on package (Very Good)
Barilla: speculated temps up to 84°C for 7 - 10 hours (Bad)

Price is a helpful indicator, but can mislead — a luxury groceries might sell a $9 bag of pasta that looks suspiciously smooth and deep yellow. Avoid these, and go on sight and messaging around time and temp.

Once you’ve found a brand worth trying, focus on the noodle, cooking just shy of al dente and enjoy it in a simple emulsified sauce, like Pasta alla Gricia (pork fat and starchy pasta water) or Cacio e Pepe (olive oil and starchy pasta water with black pepper). Buon appetito!

Related: Fresh Pasta Guide

Sources

Sissons, M., Pollini, C., Panto, F., Nespoli, A., & Abecassis, J. (2016). Manufacture of Pasta Products. In Durum Wheat Chemistry and Technology (2nd ed., pp. 161-172). Cambridge, MA: Academic Press (link).

Mercier, S., Marchais, L., Villeneuvea, S., & Foisy, M. (2011). Effect of die material on engineering properties of dried pasta. Procedia Food Science. 1. 557–562. 10.1016/j.profoo.2011.09.084 (link).

Baronti, N. (2018). Drying pasta at low temperature in air flow. Retrieved May 12, 2020, from (link).

Kill, R., & Turnbull, K. (2001). Pasta Mixing and Extrusion. In Pasta and semolina technology (pp. 86-118). Malden, MA: Blackwell Science (link).

Aktan, B., & Khan, K. (1992). Effect of high-temperature drying of pasta on quality parameters and on solubility, gel electrophoresis, and reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography of protein components. Cereal Chemistry, 69, 288–295.