Mad About Science: Pasta

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

Chances are that you’ve probably eaten pasta at some point in your life. Most people consume premade pasta from the grocery store. Dried and pre-packaged pasta saves the consumer an immense amount of time and physical labor — as anyone who’s watched MasterChef can attest, making your pasta is no simple feat.

Pasta itself is relatively straightforward. It’s unleavened dough rolled into thin sheets and cut into shapes or strips. Unleavened dough is just dough that wasn’t exposed to a rising agent like yeast. Generally, you don’t want pasta to puff up like bread or pastry dough. Pasta is meant to be a vehicle that soaks up the surrounding flavors to create a medley of taste and texture in your mouth, and sucking in too much air would often make that process less enjoyable.

That’s not to say that pasta is exclusively unleavened — raised pasta does exist, usually made from sourdough, but unleavened pasta is far more common.

Despite what your Italian grandmother may tell you, there is virtually no limit to the size and shape of pasta you can create. Numerous types exist currently, each with their own specific function and flavor profile.

Classic spaghetti noodles are a bit of a workhorse on this side of the Atlantic. They have great utility as a pasta, being round and thin, which makes them easy to store and easy to cook uniformly. Their sticky nature makes them great for soaking up sauce and bits of protein, and they’re simple to eat and even simpler to dispose of whatever hasn’t been consumed.

Note: Your Italian grandmother will beat you with a spoon if you break your spaghetti in half. There’s no real chemical or physical change to the pasta if you do or don’t break it in half, but it does make it easier to twirl around your fork when it remains unbroken. Some may argue that it’s easier to keep al dente, or slightly chewy, when a third of the pasta hasn’t cooked for as long as the rest.

Pasta used in lasagna is noticeably wider than spaghetti. This is almost exclusively to help create neatly divided layers when constructing the lasagna. Other large noodles, like bow tie pasta noodles, introduce a different amount of air into each bite, which can influence the texture and flavor of a dish. This is likely the reasoning behind unstuffed penne pasta, which can help alter the amount of air consumed while eating. This would be harder to control if the pasta were raised by yeast, so the uniform nature of pasta noodles lends itself to consistency both in the cook and the consumption.

Most pasta is made from eggs, water and wheat flour. As dietary needs have changed for a growing population of humans on a global scale, so too have pasta recipes. Numerous gluten-free variants exist, some that are packed with even more protein than classic gluten-rich types.

Spoiler alert: The gluten protein is what makes a dough. Working the gluten and giving it time to rest builds molecular bonds that create a “stickiness” to the dough that gives it structure, particularly while it’s proofing or rising in the oven, which pasta doesn’t do. Extra components are required in gluten-free dough to make the structure behave as gluten would. 

The most common ingredient to facilitate this reaction is xanthan gum. Xanthan gum is produced by allowing the Xanthomonas campestris bacteria to digest a number of simple sugars through fermentation, producing the polysaccharide xanthan gum as the final product. Unsettling as this may be, it’s not quite as gross as artificial vanilla using castoreum. Trust me, just Google it.

Pasta has a very long history. You may have heard that Marco Polo returned to Europe with noodle recipes from East Asia and gave Italian chefs their first crack at creating wheat-based pasta. This is critically wrong. While it’s completely possible that this happened, we know for a fact that this was not the first instance of pasta being created, cooked and consumed in Europe.

More than a millennia before Marco Polo’s voyage, pasta was left in an Etruscan tomb in Italy in the 4th century B.C.E. The Greeks even cited the god Vulcan as inventor of a device that created strands of dough similar to spaghetti.

Despite Italy being considered the pasta capital of the world, the French have played a much greater part in bringing pasta to North America. Thomas Jefferson, founding father and the guy on the $2 bill, brought a macaroni-making machine back to the U.S. with him from France. 

(As an extra bit of fun, the term “Macaroni fashion,” which is famously referred to in the traditional song “Yankee Doodle,” isn’t actually referring to the pasta, per say. It originated from the practice of high-faluting English dudes to enjoy the then-relatively exotic dish while traveling abroad and dressing with ostentatious luxury — making them a subject of derision for their affected and often outlandish style of dress and behavior.)

The first pasta factory in the United States was started by a Frenchman in Brooklyn, N.Y.. Fast forward to 2024, and the total revenue generated by pasta in the U.S. hovers a little north of $9.2 billion. This number is expected to grow, especially as more luxurious food sources become more difficult to acquire due to the effects of market change, inflation and economic uncertainty.

Just how much of that $9.2 billion worth of pasta is French? I’ll let you figure that one out.

Stay curious, 7B.