Dried pasta is one of the most well-known foods, in Italy we consume an average of 23/24 kg per capita per year.
But how do you choose (empirically) a good quality pasta?
Often, on the supermarket shelf, we find ourselves faced with pasta with different shades of color, ranging from an ivory white to a luminescent yellow.
Dried #pasta is obtained from the dough and subsequent extrusion, drawing and drying of durum wheat semolina and water. The phase that most determines the color of the pasta is drying.
Drying is a fundamental phase in the pasta production process, necessary to bring the moisture content to values lower than 12.5%.
The pasta drying process has undergone significant changes over time: at the end of the 19th century, drying spaghetti took about 10 days in the summer and 20-30 in the winter, while with modern systems very high temperatures are reached, between 90° and 135°C, which reduce the drying time to 2-3 hours, with a relative clear reduction in the time used and lower costs.
Pasta dried at high temperatures has excellent cooking behavior, but the high temperatures reached during drying cause the unavailability of lysine, a very important amino acid for our body, which we cannot produce autonomously. At high temperatures, lysine, when it comes into contact with sugars, is blocked and made unavailable in the Amadori compound.
A measure of the thermal damage suffered by pasta is given by the quantification of furosine, a non-natural molecule, which is formed during the drying phase with the Maillard reaction.
The presence and quantity of furosine provide indications on the quality of the pasta (Giannetti et al., 2021).
Linear correlations have also been found between the yellow point and the furosine content (Salvadeo et al., 2008).
The greater the quantity of furosine found in the laboratory, the higher the temperatures used for drying, the more yellow the colour of the pasta and the lower the overall organoleptic quality of the product.
Obviously, the indication on the label of the quantity of furosine formed is not a parameter that must be included on the label and large pasta producers are careful not to do so.
However, empirically, by choosing a light-coloured pasta, like the one in the image, we can know with a good margin of certainty that it has been dried at low temperatures for a long time.
So be wary of pasta that is too “yellow”.
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