Strozzapreti

Strozzapreti come from Romagna, the eastern half of Emilia-Romagna, and they are about as simple as pasta gets: durum semolina, water, salt. The dough is rolled out thick, cut into finger-wide strips, and each strip is rolled between the palms with a sharp twist and snapped off by hand.

What you get is a chunky, uneven twist with a partial hollow running through it. The roughness and the twist are the whole engineering: they hold thick meat sauces the way a smooth extruded shape cannot. Fresh, they cook in three or four minutes and stay firm, because there is no egg to soften them.

Dried, factory-made strozzapreti exist and are perfectly good when the extrusion is through bronze dies. Versions of the shape also turn up in Umbria, Tuscany and Le Marche, sometimes shorter, sometimes with a little egg, but Romagna is where the shape is everyday food rather than a regional curiosity.

The flavour is pure durum wheat: nutty, faintly sweet, clean. What sets strozzapreti apart is the bite. The twist means each piece has thick and thin sections, so a single mouthful gives you a chewy core and softer edges at the same time, a texture no uniform extruded pasta produces.

They are noticeably firmer and more substantial than egg pasta like tagliatelle, and rougher on the tongue than dried penne. Sauce clings to them instead of sliding off, which is the point.

Eaten plain with butter and Parmigiano they taste like good bread dough boiled: humble, wheaty, satisfying. Under a sausage ragù they disappear into the dish in the right way.

Cook fresh strozzapreti for three or four minutes and dried for eight or nine, always a minute less than you think, because they finish in the pan. Salt the water hard: this is unsalted, eggless dough and it needs it.

Drain them early, keep a mugful of the cooking water, and toss them in the pan with the sauce over a lively heat for a minute. The semolina releases enough starch that a splash of that water turns any sauce glossy and makes it stick.

The canonical pairings are the drier Romagnolo meat ragù, or crumbled Italian sausage cooked out with a splash of Sangiovese and finished with rocket and fresh tomato. On the Adriatic coast, the same shape goes with clams, cuttlefish and peas, or a seafood ragù, in which case no cheese.

They are wrong for delicate cream sauces and wrong for anything that should coat a strand, like carbonara or a fine tomato passata. Use them where the sauce has texture.

Dried strozzapreti keep to the date on the bag, generally about two years, in a cupboard away from light, heat and steam. Once the bag is open, move them to a jar or clip it shut: durum semolina draws in moisture from the air and takes on kitchen smells, and pasta that has sat open in a humid kitchen cooks unevenly and loses its snap. Fresh strozzapreti from a pasta counter run two or three days, dusted with semolina in a container that is not sealed tight, because in an airtight box they sweat and weld into a lump.

Raw fresh pasta freezes cleanly. Spread the pieces apart on a tray, freeze until hard, then bag them for up to two months and drop them into boiling water without thawing, allowing an extra minute. What you lose is a little surface texture, not shape. Cooked and dressed leftovers hold a day in the refrigerator, where the pasta keeps absorbing sauce and firms as it cools; a pan with a couple of spoons of water brings them back better than a microwave. The bag and the maker are the reference.

Hand-rolled strozzapreti are never twins. Length, thickness and the number of turns change piece to piece, and the ends are torn rather than cut, so a fresh-pasta tray of identical pieces came off a machine. In dried pasta the die does the talking: bronze leaves a chalky, matte, faintly floury surface that sauce clings to, while a Teflon die gives a smooth glossy finish that sheds it. Good bags state the wheat origin and the drying regime, and slow drying below fifty degrees is the one worth paying for. The colour should be soft straw; a deep golden yellow in a pasta with no egg on the label is worth questioning.

On a foreign shelf the shape most often sold under the name is really casarecce, machine-extruded, short and grooved with the same fold along its length in every piece. Gemelli, cavatelli and trofie are further neighbours. Note also that strangolapreti, the Trentino version of the name, is not pasta at all but a bread and spinach dumpling. Supermarket bags sit near two dollars for 500 grams; bronze-die artisan brands run three to four times that.

In the US, dried bronze-die strozzapreti from producers such as Rustichella d'Abruzzo, Sfoglini and Garofalo turn up at Whole Foods, Eataly and online, at roughly $5 to $9 per pound. Italian markets in the Northeast sometimes carry them fresh. If you cannot find the name, buy casarecce or gemelli and move on.

In the UK, Waitrose, Ocado and Italian delis carry dried strozzapreti at about £3 to £5 for 500g, or £6 to £10 per kilo. Natoora and several Italian importers ship fresh.

Check two things on any dried pack: bronze die (trafilata al bronzo) and slow drying (essiccazione lenta). The first gives you the rough surface that holds sauce, the second keeps more wheat flavour. Both are usually printed on the front, because producers who do it charge for it.

Romagna, and specifically the triangle between Santarcangelo di Romagna, Cesena and Forlì, where trattorie still roll pasta every morning. Ask for strozzapreti alla salsiccia and you will get the version most locals actually eat.

The inland village festivals of the Rimini hills, running from June to September, serve them under meat ragù in portions no restaurant would dare.

On the coast, from Cesenatico down to Cattolica, the seafood versions dominate: clams, cuttlefish, mantis shrimp. In Bologna you will find them on menus, but you are in tagliatelle and tortellini country there; strozzapreti are a visitor from down the road.