Roll Cuisine Corner
Pass the Pasta
by Pierre-Luc Moeys, Owner/Chef Oriole 9

The definition of pasta: Shaped and dried dough made from flour and water and sometimes egg.

Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so great, does it? Thankfully, the Italians have given it a delicious sounding name (sharing an origin with “paste” and “pastry”) and thus inspired, consume 62 pounds a year of pasta per capita (the U.S. ranks fourth on the list with 24). Even with the recent popularity of low–carb diets, nobody is going to say no to Mama’s pasta.

Marco Polo is known in school history books for bringing pasta back from his great travels to China, but this has generally been dismissed as mythology. Even if true, this could have been more of a rediscovery. Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans already knew of the existence of pasta, both boiling and baking it. In the first and second centuries B.C., leading poets Horace and Athenaeus of Naucratis mentioned lagane, fine sheets of fried dough that were a precursor to today’s lasagna. Around the eighth century when Sicily and southern Italy were conquered by the Arabs, dried pasta was introduced and became a hit as it was easily stored, reasonably nutritious and had a long shelf life during voyages. The Sicilians started calling it “macaroni,” derived from the Sicilian term “making dough forcefully.” And then, sometime around the nineteenth century, pasta again made a huge leap forward when it met the tomato, long considered dangerous due to the toxicity of its leaves, but finally accepted and cultivated. Things just haven’t been the same since.

The debate about the true origin of pasta is ongoing. Apparently a very well–preserved bowl of noodles from 2000 B.C. was unearthed in China not long ago. Don’t expect that to cut much with your friendly neighborhood Sicilians, though.

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what’s the deal with gluten?

The thing that gives most doughs and pastas its chewy texture and elasticity is gluten, which is a special type of protein commonly found in rye, wheat, and barley, and is found in most types of cereals and in many types of bread. Gluten provides many additional important qualities to bread. For starters, gluten keeps the gases that are released during yeast fermentation, allowing the dough to rise before it is baked. In addition, gluten firms up when it is cooked and, with the help of starch, helps ensure that the bread maintains its proper shape. Gluten also has an absorbent quality, which is why bread is capable of soaking up broth. Because of this feature, gluten is often used by those on a vegetarian diet as an imitation meat. On the downside, gluten is believed to be partly responsible for causing bread to become stale.

Some people suffer from a disease called celiac disease, which is an allergy to gluten. If improperly treated, celiac disease can be fatal. Fortunately, not all foods from the grain family contain gluten. Examples of grains that do not have gluten include wild rice, corn, buckwheat, millet, amaranth, quinoa, teff, oats, soybeans, and sunflower seeds. Since extreme care must be taken when eating grains that do not contain gluten, it’s important to know the source of your grains, particularly oats and teff, as they are commonly grown near foods with gluten or processed in the same bins.