Thermoworks August 17, 2018 By Martin
If there is a food that is more versatile than pasta, I’m not sure what it is. The sheer taxonomy of it alone boggles the mind. Fresh and dried, filled and unfilled, extruded or rolled, hollow or solid—those are just the forms. Then there are the preparations—tomato sauces of a million varieties, pesto, cream sauces. And yet, despite—or perhaps because of—that ubiquity, pasta is constantly simmered in myth and folklore. In this article we intend to dispel some of those myths, and to tell you how to use actual tools, rather than folklore, to achieve perfect pasta.
Contents: Pasta history and background
Pasta science
Difficulties of pasta cookery
Boil-overs
Clumpy pasta
How to cook pasta
Pasta al pomodoro recipePasta history and backgroundPasta was not introduced to Italy from China by Marco Polo in the 13th century. Both written records, as well as archaeological evidence, suggests that pasta was made from wheat or its relatives in Italy for centuries before that time. While Polo may have brought some noodles back with him from his journeys, by no means was he the means of their introduction to the people at large.
Pastas in various forms may go back as far as the 4th century B.C, but because these “edible pastesâ€(a literal translation of what some pastas were called in Italy for a long time) were the food of the common people, there is little record of them.
In America, we most often associate pasta with spaghetti, though that is a particular shape of pasta. And we also mostly associate it with tomato sauces, though those are a relatively recent addition to the Italian menu canon. In fact, the first recorded recipe for a tomato sauce for pasta comes from an 1839 Italian cookbook, Cucina teorico pratica, by Ippolito Cavalcanti.
The root of Pasta’s popularity in the States stems primarily from the vast migration of Italians, especially from Naples, to the USA in the late 1800’s. They brought with them an appetite for pasta that was, for the most part, served by import for decades. But due to interrupted supplies of pasta imports during the First World War, pasta production became a real thing in America in the 1910s and 20s. To produce the pasta, farmers in the Dakotas began growing durum wheat to meet the demand. In fact, to this day most of the wheat grown for pasta, even in Italy, is grown in the American Midwest.
Durum wheat is important because it is exceptionally high in protein (
gluten), which gives the pasta the structure it needs to dry and reconstitute effectively. Which brings us to the science of pasta.
Science of pasta: the interplay of starch and proteinMore:
https://blog.thermoworks.com/2018/08/how-to-cook-pasta-better/