For Something So Simple, Pasta Is Serious Business

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For Something So Simple, Pasta Is Serious Business

They twirled, they sniffed, they slurped, they chewed.

The dozen housewives who gathered in a Rome hotel on a recent afternoon took their work terribly seriously, rating plates of pasta for chewiness, saltiness, gumminess or done-ness — that perfect balance known as “al dente,” or firm to the bite.

Pasta is serious business in Italy, and the recent blind taste test organized by the world’s biggest pasta maker drove home that an awful lot of thought goes into making the simple combination of durum wheat semolina and water from which Italy’s national dish is made.

“The simpler it is, the more testing it takes,” said Stefania Fochi, in charge of consumer testing for market leader Barilla, which organized the taste test.

Pasta sales worldwide have grown steadily over the past three years, to €22.3 billion ($28 billion) last year, according to Euromonitor research. In Italy, however, sales have fallen steadily over that same timeframe as the economy suffers and stores are forced to offer discounts. National pasta sales dropped to €2.7 billion ($3.4 billion) last year from €3.1 billion ($3.9 billion) in 2009 — meaning spaghetti makers in these days of austerity need to try harder to keep their customers loyal.

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Granted, in Italy, it’s not a huge challenge given that most Italians eat a plate of pasta — be it spaghetti alla carbonara, penne al ragu or orecchiette with broccoli — at least once a day. But they are terribly discerning customers: A noodle is not just a noodle.

“Some were sticky, some were good, al dente and cooked the right amount of time,” said Stefania De Rossi, a 46-year-old mother of three who was selected for the taste test because of her family’s daily pasta habit. “I liked the last one (identified only by its code name: V36). It wasn’t super smooth, it was a bit rough but seemed better.”

Her pickiness stems in part from Italians’ particular obsession with food: Eating in Italy is taken very seriously on both a family and cultural level. The Slow Food movement was born here and you can smell, see and taste this way of life at this time of year in outdoor markets, exploding with bundles of fresh asparagus now that the green and purple hills of artichokes have begun to wane.

And what better way to enjoy those asparagus tips than to sautee them in olive oil with bits of speck, a smoky cut of prosciutto, and toss the whole thing with a small mound of linguine?

“Pasta is truly the symbol, the emblem not just of Italian food … but the principal plate of the Mediterranean diet,” said Amelia Germoleo, vice director of the National Pasta Museum in Rome. “It’s profoundly rooted in the culture, the lifestyle, the ‘being’ of Italy.”

The museum, which is currently closed for renovations, seeks to enlighten visitors about pasta’s past, including the very Italian origins of dried pasta, the stuff that comes in packages and can be preserved, as opposed to egg-based fresh pasta that must be eaten quickly.

It turns out Marco Polo didn’t bring spaghetti to the West from China. Rather, Germoleo said, the earliest known origins of dried pasta date from 12th century Sicily. The Norman king of Sicily, King Ruggero II, instructed a geographer to write a book about all that was known of the world.

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