How to recognise good quality pasta!!

I get a lot of people asking me why my pasta is so different from other pastas found in supermarkets and shops. Well my answer has always been because we use the best semolina you can find in Italy, and secondly because we make our pasta like our grandmothers and grand grandmothers use to make it, the old fashion way, our traditional way, using antique methods that allows the pasta to have a consistency than when cooked is like fresh pasta and has a natural taste. Of course no additives, enhancers and massive produced techniques are used.
So then I get the question of, how can we identify when a pasta is of good quality?
Well, unfortunately that can be quite tricky but still there are ways of seeing whether the pasta is of at least a decent quality.
The aspects you should look at are size, colour and thickness of the pasta. Industrially made pasta is quite small in size. Although we can find many types of traditional shapes from the largest to the smallest normally massive produced pasta shapes tend to be smaller than the traditional size for that particular shape. Of course, to be able to recognise this you would have to know what’s the traditional size for that shape, which in most cases is impossible. So the best thing would be if you can actually get a good quality or proper handmade pasta of the shape you are analysing and compare the size of that pasta with the industrially made one, so you can have an idea of the sizes.

The second aspect you should look at is the colour. Massive produced pasta is kind of yellow because the dough which was made from probably had more ingredients added to it than what it should have. Handmade or good quality pasta has a very light yellow or white colour because is the actual colour of the semolina. Of course the quality of the semolina used influences this a great deal. Also, massive produced pasta has a sort of transparency look to it probably because the dough from which it was made of was thinner in consistency than what it should be allowing producers to produce more amount of pasta per kilo of dough. Good handmade pasta will have a solid look, ie it won’t look weak if you know what I mean, it will look heavy.

The third aspect to look for will be thickness. Good handmade pasta will be thick. This gives the pasta the consistency handmade pasta has. If you look massive produced pasta you’ll see that the shape will be very thin, looking at the cut edge. Again, because the dough used was very thin and when squeezed through the machine to form the shape is using the least quantity of dough to produce more amount of pasta per kilo of dough.

The next aspect you can check this time when cooking or after cooked is the consistency. As I said industrially produced pasta is quite light in weight where as handmade pasta or good quality pasta will be heavier making you eat less to feel full. The consistency will be softer than normal dry pasta, the shape would have grown/extended in size more than normally massive produced dry pasta will because the dough would absorbed more water .
So to conclude we can say the best dry pasta you can get would be one that when cooked is like fresh handmade pasta.

Well I hope you guys liked the article and of course that was useful.