Do You Know How The Pasta Is Made?

Do you know how the pasta is made? Most people would definitely give a NO to this question. This article will help you understand how pasta is made. It is important for those entrepreneurs who wish to enter into the business.

Let’s get started!

First, the most important equipment in pasta making is the noodle making machine. Hence, a quality pasta product starts with high-quality raw materials. Durum wheat. It is ideal for pasta because of its unique color, flavor and culinary qualities. The incoming wheat is weighed, sampled and analyzed, after passing through the preliminary cleaning stage, it is then is stored according to its quality.

Meticulous cleaning of the wheat semolina is required. Cleaners remove seeds, dust, and other foreign materials. The cleaning machines separate them by size (separator), by specific weight (stone remover and gravity table), and by shape (intended to be cylindrical). Friction cleaning equipment (scrubbers) scrub the grain surface, removing most of the fiber layers.

The next stage is grain tempering. During tempering, water is added to thicken the outer layers of fiber for easier separation from the endosperm. Tempering also allows the endosperm to mature, with views towards the mill. Traditionally, durum wheat is tempered for a relatively short time. However, the new technology of pasta manufacturing allows the use of finer semolina, which allows it to be tempered for a longer period of time.

Grinding

Grinding is essentially a process for separation and crushing. Grinding is done in breaker rolls, metering rolls, and reducer rolls. Separation is done using machines called sifters and purifiers. A semolina mill has a braking system in which the grinding is done relatively gradually. The endosperm is released in the form of coarse granules, not in the form of flour. The quality, purification and size systems are more extensive in a semolina mill, but the reduction system is much smaller compared to a flour mill.

Pasta

To make the pasta, the semolina is mixed with water (egg is also needed) to form a lumpy paste. The dough is not completely formed until it passes through the mixing chamber into the extruder.

The dough is forced through several shaped cutters (see below), under very high pressures, to produce a wide range of different shapes of pasta. The extrusion chamber is designed to dissipate the heat generated by friction and pressure during the extrusion process. To prevent the paste from sticking together in the carving process, the elongated paste is subjected to a blast of air immediately after extrusion. The short paste is transferred to a pre-dryer agitator to ensure that it is separated.

Dry

The noodle making machine plays a crucial role in this stage. The drying process is a crucial part of the production process for high-quality pasta. Humidity, airflow, and temperature are carefully controlled as the paste passes through the different cutters. Modern high-temperature drying systems achieve a paste with better color and cooking quality. In the final stage of drying, the paste returns to normal atmospheric conditions in refrigeration chambers. In general, the product is dried to the humidity of approximately 12%. The total drying time can take from 6 to 24 hours, depending on the technology used.

Packaging

After drying, the pasta is cooled, stored, cut and packed.

The various forms

An extremely important characteristic of the pasta is the richness and variety of shapes it has. Although all pasta is produced with the same raw materials, each form, in a certain sense, has its own personality: with respect to, for example, the type of sauce that suits it best; or the way to use it, accompanied by meat or vegetables, with or without sauce. Pasta forms develop culinary creativity because they are themselves the result of a creative process. The countless number of pasta forms is the basis for thousands of possible recipes, each with different characteristics. And this distinctive element of pasta is basically created by just one object: the carver.