instead of minutes. Indeed, according to McGee, the term al
dente didn’t appear until after World War I. How’s that for
tradition?
Given its varied background, I say that you should cook
pasta whichever way works best (just don’t tell your nonna,
if you have one).
MOST PASTA these days comes in two basic
forms, dried and fresh.
Fresh pasta, made from wheat flour and eggs, is widely
used in Northern Italy. The eggs add richness and color and
improve the texture of the pasta, allowing it to become both
tender and bouncy as it cooks. It’s made by forming a stiff
dough out of the eggs and flour, then rolling that dough
repeatedly between two roller plates, getting progressively
thinner with each roll, before finally cutting it into the
desired shape. Since making fresh pasta requires time and
specialized equipment, we won’t be dealing with it much in
this book. Instead, we’re going to focus on the dried
version.
Dried pasta, which originated in Southern Italy, is
generally made from durum flour and water. Durum is a
high-protein flour that allows you to form a tough, malleable
dough that holds its shape well. This is particularly
important for the intricate folded or extruded shapes that
dried pasta comes in. To form dried pasta into shapes, the
stiff dough is pressed into a machine that forces it through
metal dies that extrude it, then cut into smaller lengths.
The very best dried pastas have a distinct wheaty flavor
and, more important, a rough texture that allows them to