Cooking For Engineers

[Jack Schmidling]

Cooked dry pasta has a texture and bite that can not be duplicated in cooked fresh pasta.

Any fresh pasta can be given this texture by simply drying it over night before cooking.

Problem is that the pasta becomes maddeningly brittle after drying and I have spent a good deal of time and materials trying to find a way to make dried pasta at least in the same ballpark as the store stuff. I can't even get close. At best, the tensile strength of my best efforts is about 1/5 that of commercial product.

I have tried every type of flour I could find, with/without eggs, oil, water, gluten and salt. Resting times to 24 hrs.

Nothing has helped.

The only thing I have not tried is extruding the pasta in a vacuum as has been hinted at somewhere of being part of the commercial process. Sees to get unwanted air out. Implementing this at home in a practical way would be a bit of a challenge.

Anyone have any ideas?

Jack Schmidling, Marengo, Il.

[Dilbert]

if I do fresh pasta it's to use as fresh, so not encountered this situation.

it makes sense that extruding would "compact" the dough much more than just rolling it out.