Guide
Egg vs semolina: the two doughs
Almost every pasta is one of two recipes. The dough tells you the region, the texture, and the sauce.
Strip away the hundreds of shapes and nearly all of Italian pasta comes down to two doughs. Knowing which one you are holding tells you where it comes from, how it will feel, and what it wants on top.
Semolina and water
Coarse-ground durum wheat semolina, mixed with water and nothing else, is the dough of the South and of dried pasta. Durum is hard and high in protein, so it holds a firm bite, and it is the wheat that survives drying without turning brittle. This is spaghetti, penne, rigatoni, the extruded shapes that fill the supermarket aisle, built for tomato, oil, and seafood.
Soft wheat and egg
Finer soft wheat flour bound with egg is the dough of the North, of Emilia-Romagna's sfoglia rolled by hand. The egg makes it rich, golden, tender, and a little porous, so fat clings to it. This is tagliatelle, tagliolini, the filled tortellini and ravioli, made for butter, cream, and gentle ragus.
Where they cross
The line is not absolute. Some hand-formed Southern shapes use semolina worked by hand without egg, like Puglia's orecchiette, and a few Northern cuts add egg to a semolina base. But as a first guess, egg means North, fresh, and tender; semolina means South, dried, and firm. The dough is the quiet fact under every shape.
Make it at home
The kit
The tools and references a home cook reaches for when the reading turns into making. None of it is required, and the cheap things matter more than the expensive ones.
- A manual pasta machine
A hand-cranked roller takes a ball of egg dough down to a sheet you can cut into tagliatelle or layer for lasagna. The clamp-on Marcato Atlas is the long-running standard.
- A bronze-die extruder
For the extruded shapes the roller cannot make. A bronze die leaves the faintly rough surface that holds a sauce, the same trafilata al bronzo a good box advertises.
- A wooden drying rack
Fresh-cut strands need somewhere to hang before they cook or store. A folding wooden rack keeps a batch of tagliolini from clumping into a single knot.
- A gnocchi and garganelli board
The ridged board that presses the grooves into gnocchi, garganelli, and cavatelli, so a sauce has somewhere to sit. The hand-formed shapes of the South start here.
- A bench scraper
The one cheap tool that makes hand-mixing dough on a counter tolerable. It lifts, cuts, and clears the sticky stage before the dough comes together.
- "00" flour and semolina
The two doughs in one order. Fine 00 flour for tender egg pasta, coarse durum semolina for the firm Southern shapes worked with water alone.
- The Geometry of Pasta
Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy pair a black-and-white drawing of each shape with the sauce it was built for. The closest thing in print to how this site thinks.
- Pasta Grannies
Vicky Bennison's collection of hand-formed shapes recorded from the Italian women who still make them by hand. The reference for the shapes a machine cannot quite fake.
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