Pasta
is pasta; anyway any pasta is the same !!!
That’s often true, above all when the coverings and the colours of the same pasta are changed and when, sometimes, the pasta produced in the same factory is used for different trademarks (and at different prices!).
Anyway,
there is still someone in Italy who cares for reminding everybody that some
kinds of pasta may be different and better than others. They are the pasta
factories which are careful at those two or three things making the difference:
the selection of the best kinds of durum wheat; the bronze dies; the slow and
natural drying process at low temperature.
Durum wheat costs more and if used, you are forced to adopt the artisanal techniques exalting its superiority.
The
bronze dies, unlike the teflon ones used in the large industrial production,
give the pasta the porousness and roughness necessary to the perfect marriage
with sauce and condiments.
The
essential difference is just the slow drying process at natural temperature: the
industrial production pasta is exposed at very high temperature drying it in a
very short time. The contra-indication is that, in this way, it vitrifies so forming a kind
of hard and waterproof surface. When you drain the pasta, which is called “al
dente”, it will always maintain a troublesomely hard external surface, and the
cooking will never be the same in its thickness. Moreover the impermeability of
the surface will make the absorption of the sauce very difficult. The natural
drying process needs more time but it makes the pasta absorb the boiling water
in a more pleasant and unvarying way, and amalgamate itself perfectly with any
sauce.
Just
one warning: this kind of pasta is not always “al dente”, so you have to be
careful at the perfect point of cooking, not a minute more, not a minute less,
and that derives only through tasting it and through experience.
It
costs more than the famous pasta in commerce, but please, taste it, and if you
like it, make your own accounts: for a little bit of money in addition to
every plate...maybe it is worth eating it, isn’t it ?
The
quality, as life, does not have price.