Semolina Pasta

It isn’t worth making extruded pasta shapes yourself (rigatoni, spaghetti and the like): their thinner section actually benefits from drying beforehand, so the packaged products are ideal. These are also impossible to make at home without considerable investment in equipment.

The ‘peasant’ pasta shapes – traditionally made by hand (orecchiette, trofie, cavatelli, anything that looks irregular) – are by their very nature thicker. These quite simply take too long to cook from dry – by the time the inside is beginning to cook, the outer surface will have turned to mush. Making these at home is laborious and time-consuming, but the returns are well worth the effort.