Pasta, bread and doughs

The die is the last hole the dough is pushed through. Bronze is soft and scrapes, so the surface comes out porous and microscopically rough, and that roughness is the only reason sauce clings instead of sliding to the bottom of the bowl. Teflon leaves it smooth and glossy: handsome in the bag, deaf to sauce.

You can spot it through the packaging. Bronze-drawn pasta is pale and chalky, does not catch the light, and leaves semolina dust in the bottom of the bag; the cut ends look slightly torn. Teflon pasta is amber and polished, and the bag stays clean.

Drying is a separate claim: slow means under 50C for twenty to forty hours, fast means over 80C in a few hours, and in between sits the 60-75C band where most industrial pasta is actually dried. So bronze is worth paying for with anything that works by emulsion (garlic and oil, cacio e pepe, carbonara, pesto, clams), barely worth it under bechamel or in soup, and worth nothing if you overcook it. Rough guide in a UK supermarket: own-brand about £1.50 to £2.50 per 500 g, credible bronze-drawn Italian brands about £3.50 to £7.

What bronze physically does is expose the starch instead of sealing it under the protein network: the drag of a soft metal leaves a more porous surface and a discontinuous gluten mesh, with the granules facing out rather than buried. That exposed starch dissolves first once the pasta hits the water, which is why a bronze-drawn brand clouds the pot far more than a teflon one. The cloud is not a fault, it is free thickener: keep a mugful and you need less of it in the pan to pull a sauce together. The same studies hand teflon the other half of the trade: its more continuous protein network holds up better in the pot, so bronze is not better in the abstract, it is better for the sauce.

Drying matters more than the die, and almost nobody shopping abroad looks for it. Above 80C the gluten sets fast and cages the starch, so even mediocre semolina survives the pot, at the cost of a biscuity note where the wheat should be. Under 50C the network builds slowly and the wheat stays, but only strong semolina holds up. That is why the protein line is the most honest number on an imported box: 13-14 g per 100 g means a bite that survives a distracted cook, under 12 g means a pasta that gives up early.

Unlearn the hierarchy the supermarket implies. Dried pasta is durum semolina and water, and Italian law allows nothing else in semolina pasta. It is the correct product for oil, tomato, seafood and pulses, because only durum still has a bite after ten minutes in boiling water.

Egg pasta is a different object, not a better one: fresh sheets are soft wheat and eggs, rolled rather than extruded, while dried boxed egg pasta, tagliatelle included, has to be durum semolina by law. The legal floor is 200 g of whole egg per kilo of semolina, about four eggs, while a home cook in Emilia uses one egg per 100 g. It cooks in one to three minutes and wants fat: butter, broth, slow meat ragu.

The third is fresh semolina pasta with no egg, orecchiette, trofie and malloreddus, chewy on purpose and able to take loud sauces. The chilled packs are a fourth thing whatever the label says: the rules only require fresh pasta to hold 24 per cent moisture, and almost all of it is extruded, pasteurised and gas-flushed, closer to rehydrated dried pasta than to a rolled sheet. Good dried pasta beats it at half the price.

The numbers are worth carrying around. An Emilian sheet at one egg per 100 g of flour comes to about ten eggs and roughly 500 g of whole egg per kilo, two and a half times the legal floor. Chilled supermarket pasta is pasteurised instead, a heat step that part-cooks the starch, which is exactly why it is done in two to four minutes against eight to fourteen for dried and six to twelve for fresh semolina shapes.

That changes how much you buy, and these are guidelines rather than rules. Dried pasta absorbs about its own weight and roughly doubles, so 80-100 g a head fills a plate. Rolled egg pasta starts out wet and gains far less, so go 120-150 g. Fresh semolina shapes sit between, 100-120 g. In broth, go lighter: 80-130 g of filled pasta per person, depending on whether it opens the meal or is the meal.

The working guideline is about one litre of water and 10 g of salt per 100 g of pasta. You will read that the water should be as salty as the sea: it should not, because seawater is around 35 g per litre, roughly three times too much. You can drop to 700 ml for starchier water if you stir early.

Salt goes in once the water boils, but not to speed anything up: 10 g per litre lifts the boiling point by less than two tenths of a degree, around 0.2C. You wait because undissolved grains pit the hot base of a stainless pan over the years. Little of it reaches the food: pasta absorbs roughly its own weight in water, about a gram of salt per portion, which is why unsalted pasta cannot be fixed at the table.

The cloudy water is the ingredient you have been throwing away: suspended starch plus salt, the thickener that makes a sauce coat. Keep a mugful, drain one to two minutes early, then finish pasta and sauce together in the pan with a ladle of it, moving, for thirty to sixty seconds until the liquid turns glossy and grabs. Cheese and raw egg go in off the heat, because above 65-70C cheese seizes and egg scrambles. Al dente is the thin white line in the core.

There is a real threshold under all that boiling. In plenty of water, durum starch granules start taking on water and gelatinising as low as 52-60C and are essentially done between 66 and 75C (on durum spaghetti the peak falls between 62.6 and 66.9C), while the 85C figure belongs to water-limited conditions like a bread dough. Below that window the starch stays raw however long you wait. A full boil is not impatience: it is how the core of the strand crosses that line while the surface is still intact. Undersize the pot and the water stalls near 80C, and the outside breaks down waiting for the middle.

The pan stage runs on the same physics. Shaking breaks the fat into droplets, and the dissolved starch thickens the water around them so they cannot merge back; both are needed, which is why sauce ladled over a still bowl splits and the same sauce tossed in a hot pan does not. To use all of that starch, cook risotto-style: nearly raw pasta into the pan, then ladles of boiling water or stock. It suits beans, seafood and thick shapes; salt at the end, because the pan reduces.

Three variables decide everything: surface sets grip, geometry sets how much sauce is captured, thickness sets bite. Buy one long shape, one short ridged shape and one small soup shape and you can cook nearly the whole repertoire.

Long and smooth is for thin sauces with nothing solid in them, like garlic and oil or clams, where the sauce works as a film and ridges add nothing. Cacio e pepe is the exception: it wants a thick strand, spaghettoni or square tonnarelli, which sheds starch and stays rigid under the cream instead of collapsing.

Hollow and ridged is for anything fatty, because the fat needs somewhere to sit while the fork lifts: bucatini with amatriciana, rigatoni with meat ragu. Then match the shape to the size of the lumps: paccheri collapse around seafood ragu, orecchiette cup greens and breadcrumbs, while in Liguria pesto goes on trofie, trenette and linguine alike. For broth and beans go small: ditalini in pasta e fagioli, tortellini in broth and nothing else.

One number sits under all three: specific surface, how much pasta is exposed per 100 g. It follows thickness rather than size: in a tube it is the wall that counts, so a thin-walled pacchero carries more of it than a thick rigatone. Shapes with plenty of it, thin strands and ridges and fine-walled hollows, hold a lot of sauce per gram and want a sauce that runs and coats them as a film. Size decides something else, the cavity: a big concave shape traps, so it wants solids that wedge rather than slide.

Seen that way the classic pairings stop being folklore. Shelled clams are solids, but the bulk of that sauce is brine emulsified with oil, so a round strand holding a film is most of what it needs and a cavity would add little. Meat ragu comes in lumps of 2-5 mm and the bore of a rigatone is 8-16 mm: the lumps go in with room to spare, and it is that room that keeps them inside instead of letting them slide back out. Pesto is a stiff paste that does not run, and the Ligurian tradition gives it to trofie but equally to trenette and linguine, which are smooth: that pairing is custom, not mechanics.

Italian loaves answer one question: how long did this have to keep. Altamura bread is durum semolina, sourdough, 2 per cent sea salt and little water: the rules call for about 60 litres per 100 kg of semolina, so roughly 60 per cent hydration, with a crust required to be at least 3 mm thick. It lasts a week. Tuscan bread has no salt and dries fast on purpose, to be eaten with salty things or turned into soup. Carasau is rolled paper-thin, puffed, split and baked again, and keeps for months, which is why it is one of the few Italian breads you can buy abroad. A michetta is nearly all crust and air, perfect at eight and cardboard by six.

Judge a loaf without tasting it. It should feel heavier than it looks, the crust should be dark and crackle under your thumb rather than bend, and the base should sound hollow. Ignore the rule that big irregular holes mean quality: they signal high hydration in wheat breads, but a proper durum loaf is mixed at barely 60 per cent water and so has a fine, even, yellow crumb. The bad sign is the opposite, tiny identical bubbles under a soft crust.

Stale is not dry. Bread stales because starch recrystallises, fastest just above freezing, which makes the fridge the worst place for a loaf and the freezer a full stop. Cut side down on a board for two days, slice and freeze beyond that, and revive it by wetting the crust and giving it five to eight minutes at 200C. After that it is an ingredient: panzanella, ribollita, dumplings, meatballs, breadcrumbs toasted in oil.

Three things happen in the oven. Past 60C the starch gelatinises and the gluten sets, fixing the structure: the crumb goes from batter to solid. At the surface the water boils off, the temperature climbs past 140C and the Maillard reaction begins, producing the colour and most of the aroma: bread smells of bread in the crust, not in the crumb. The crust then works as a barrier against moisture leaving, which is the physical reason Altamura's mandatory 3 mm is not decoration.

Staling is the sequel, and it is not drying out, at least while the loaf is wrapped or covered. The water stays in the bread and migrates from crumb to crust, so the crust softens while the crumb hardens, as amylopectin slowly recrystallises. Leave a loaf bare on the board and some water does go to the room as well, and the two add up. Recrystallisation runs fastest between 0 and 8C, so a day in the fridge costs you about six on the counter. Crumb structure, meanwhile, is mostly hydration: 60-65 per cent water gives the fine even crumb that slices and holds a topping, Altamura's band exactly, which is why its crumb comes out that way; above 75, the big glossy holes that let oil run straight through.