Round strings of spaghetti, macaroni with holes, flat ribbons of tagliatelle – all these are pasta, which is Italian for ‘paste’. They are made from coarsely ground wheat flour, called ‘semolina’, mixed into a stiff paste with water.
You can make the dough in your own kitchen, but usually it is done with large mechanical mixers in pasta factories. The paste is then formed into whatever shape is required. In the kitchen, you can simply roll it out and cut it with a knife into strips of tagliatelle, or you can extrude it through a simple press (like a mincer with holes that do not rotate) to make spaghetti.
In industrial pasta presses, the dough is squeezed by a screw like the one in the middle of a mincer, an forced under high pressure through a perforated die.
Outside the die, a knife cuts off the strings of pasta as they emerge. When the knife moves slowly you get long strings, when it goes more quickly you get long strings, when it goes more quickly you get short pieces, and at top speed it gives thin slices.
The shape of the holes in the die governs the shapes of the pasta – round holes for spaghetti, star-shaped holes for little stars, and so on.
For macaroni, however, the hole has to be more complicated. It has a solid centre connected to the edges by fine spokes. The sticky paste comes through under high pressure, leaving the large hole in the middle, but the gaps left by the spokes join up again afterwards.
Picture Credit : Google
