Pasta is the most democratic of foods – delicious, adaptable  It’s cheap, too – but just how cheap varies enormously. Bargain basement pasta costs 95p for 500g at the moment, enough for five hearty portions; but posh ones can come in at more than 10 times that. Not to mention that the price of pasta has increased by 90 per cent in two years, new research has revealed.

 Edited  by |ANNA sam

Food   section -  CJ journalist

World  - February 28, 2023  

So, what’s the difference? Some contain egg, making for a silkier, often more delicate texture – and usually a higher price, although they make a good treat and need hardly any sauce. At the other end of the desirability scale are the bags of garish stripy pastas that lurk dustily in deli gift selections. Nobody wants to be given those.

But our standard pasta, the stuff of countless weekday dinners, is just flour and water, dried. What could poss­ibly go wrong? It turns out it’s worth being pernickety with pasta details – and price isn’t everything.

Durum wheat gives a yellowy hue to pasta, which we consumers love – so much that wheat breeders are selecting varieties with higher levels of carot­en­oids to boost the colour. But don’t be too seduced by that sunshiny glow, except in the case of egg pasta which ought to be a pleasing custard yellow.

Italian cookery queen Anna del Conte describes good pasta (but not the kind with egg in) as being “pale yellow buff”. Deep amber pasta has probably been dried fast at a high temperature, in as little as three hours, darkening the colour as well as making a glassy, smooth surface. Traditionally, slow-dried pasta can take as long as 72 hours to dry, and often looks pallid and chalky in the packet. It has a more porous texture, better for absorbing sauce.

Pasta shapes are extruded through “dies” – plates with holes in. A matt, rough surface on the pasta means that a traditional bronze die has been used. It’s a slower process than modern ­non-stick dies, but the pasta sauce will cling to the pasta better. Bronze-die pasta also seems to give up a bit more starch to the cooking water: a spoonful of this added to a sauce will help it form a smooth emulsion.

Properly, pasta should be made with the very hard part of the durum wheat endosperm (the starchy part of the grain, as opposed to the bran or the germ).

Orindary flour makes for a softer and stickier texture

This is called semola or semolina. The softer part of the endosperm can also be ground to make flour, but semolina is preferred because it absorbs water well and gives the most bouncy texture, so look for “durum wheat semolina” on the ingredients label. If it says “durum wheat” or “durum wheat flour”, it may not all be semolina. If ordinary flour is included (as in Tesco’s cheapo Hearty Food Co version), then the texture will probably be softer and stickier.

Not all durum wheat is from Italy – it doesn’t seem to be a requirement that the origin is shown on the packet, and most brands don’t bother to say where it comes from, so kudos to Tesco for being transparent enough to label theirs as “made using EU and non-EU durum wheat”.

There’s no doubt that when it comes to cooking, pasta is a gas guzzler. Italian cooks recommend at least one litre of water and 10g of salt (a rounded teaspoonful) for 100g of pasta for each person.

So, supper for four will mean bringing four litres of water to the boil. In my largest lidded pan on my most powerful gas burner (a 5kWh number designed for a wok), that took just shy of 20 minutes. Add in 10 minutes of cooking time, and allowing 7p per kWh, and that’s 17p (although that cost can vary depending on what energy prices are like at any given time). Not staggering, I grant you, but not that green, either – and if you are using electricity, it’ll be even more expensive.

Some of the more scientific cooks have debunked the traditional way of cooking and suggested a more fuel-­efficient method instead. Harold McGee, who has a Dalai Lama-like ­status in food-science circles, recommends putting 450g pasta in 1.45 litres of cold salted water and bringing it to the boil, giving a total cooking time of about 15 minutes and saving 50 per cent of your cooking costs. It works well, plus the cooking water is extra starchy, great for adding to a sauce.