Ingredients Durum-wheat flour and water.
How Made Factory made in a spoked wheel shape. They are boiled in abundant salted water.
Also Known As For the smallest sizes, rotelle and rotelline, but also rotine.
How Served Generally as pastasciutta, but the smallest size is cooked in broth.
Many machine-inspired pasta shapes of various sizes arrived with the industrial age, and particularly the automobile, in the early twentieth century. Thus, we have not only ruote (wheels), but also radiatori (radiators) and lancette (a pastina shaped like pen nibs). And there are others: Frese, fresine, and sfresatine (variations on a kind of cutter) are in the tagliatelle family, but are wider and longer and have a slightly ruffled edge. Trivelli are short, ridged tubes, just as the first trivelle (industrial drills) must have been. Gomiti (elbows) are curved tubes of various sizes, and eliche (“helixes,” but also “propellers”) are shaped like propellers and include two variants, eliche grandi and elicoidali. Very similar are spole and spolette (“spools” or “bobbins”). In the 1950s, a de cade when people had Martians on the mind, there were even disk-shaped dischi volanti (flying saucers).
