Green Dean’s Blog

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Essentially, all pasta starts out as fresh pasta but some is made to be eaten soft. Fresh pasta can be made with slightly different ingredients than the dried variety. Many northern regions of Italy use all-purpose flour and eggs while southern Italy usually makes their pasta from semolina and water, but it depends upon the recipe. Serving pasta that is made fresh that day shows a great deal of care in preparation and a high level of pride in the household's culinary skills. However, fresh pasta is not inherently better than dried pasta; it is just different and is used in different situations.
Some types of pasta are served only fresh, others only dried and some others can have fresh and dried versions mixed together. It is in this case that it can be argued that fresh is better than dried pasta.
Fresh pasta has been made in households throughout Italy for generations, but the region of Emilia-Romagna has the reputation of making the best. It is here that fresh pasta is often served with cream sauces or a simple sauce of butter and sage, during winter, while light tomato sauces are reserved for the summer months. Following the simple but important rule of using fresh local ingredients, the Piedmontese serve their fresh pasta with a butter sauce covered with slices of decadent local black truffles. Wherever you are in Italy, being served fresh homemade pasta is a real treat, as you can be assured that the pasta was made that day and will have a taste that will make you rethink notions of what good pasta is.

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There are roughly 350 different shapes and varieties of dried pasta in Italy, and even more counting regional differences. Shapes range from simple tubes to bow ties (farfalle, which means butterfly), to unique shapes like tennis rackets (racchette). Many, but not all of these types are usually available wherever pasta is made. By Italian law, dried pasta must be made with 100% durum semolina flour and water, a practice that all but the worst quality pasta makers worldwide have since adhered to. However, there are two factors in dried pasta from Italy that make it typically better than most other products: extrusion and drying methods.

Dried pasta, especially the more complex shapes (such as radiatore) are designed for grabbing and holding onto sauces. Dried tube pasta (ziti or penne) often has ridges or slight abrasions on the surface to hold onto the pasta sauce as well. These ridges and bumps are created during the extrusion process, when the pasta is forced from a copper mold and cut to desired length before drying. These molds, while expensive and prone to wear are favoured for making the best dried pasta. However, most producers worldwide use steel molds that produce pasta that is too smooth to hold onto sauce. Fortunately, more pasta makers outside of Italy are starting to use the older style copper molds.

After the pasta is cut it must be dried using a process of specific temperature and time. This is another area where mass produced pasta falls short of good Italian pasta made the correct way. The mass produced pastas are dried at very high temperatures for a shorter time than quality pasta. Traditional pasta is allowed to dry slower, for up to 50 hours, and at a much lower temperature. It is after the pasta is fully dried that it is packaged. The result is a product with a much better mouth-feel, quicker cooking time and superior sauce-holding noodles.