Covered in cream, partnered with pesto, and befriended by a bolognese, pasta is one of the ultimate, top-tier comfort foods. There are a million and one ways to eat them! When you look at the actual pasta itself, you’ll find two camps of people — pasta with egg in the batter and pasta made just from water. Which is right? Well, the answer may be more nuanced than expected.
When you look at Italian cuisine, you can’t define it as a whole. For most of history, Italy wasn’t even considered a unified front until 1861. Before then, Italy was made up of several, large city-states, which mostly acted as their own kingdoms or acted independently from the entirety of the state. Cuisine varied from region to region based upon the terroir of the local area and the exchanges of goods brought upon by interactions with other cultures. When it comes to pasta, people define true, authentic pasta one way or the other — it’s only flour and water, or it has to have eggs in it — but what if both types were authentic Italian pasta?
Eggs in pasta have a dividing border, and this border is drawn as a northern and southern line.
The wheat grown in the north has less protein in their wheat germ. This low protein flour is described as soft flour or a 00 flour. Since there is less protein and in conclusion, less gluten to form strong, sticky, pasta bonds, northern pasta makers have to add eggs to the pasta dough. An egg’s protein-packed white gives just enough oomph to bind the pasta and give the pasta structure in order to be stretched and shaped.
In the south, the growing conditions for wheat are much different. Wheat cultivated in southern Italy has more protein and is considered a hard flour called durum flour. This hard flour has enough protein to simply mix with water and stretch out into expansive sheets of dough. This type of pasta dough is used successfully in shaped pasta churned out by a machine, as the dough can form and maintain complex shapes.
Both ingredient lists for pasta dough are authentic and correct to the regional wheat varieties. The flour you have on hand dictates the ingredients you’ll use in a pasta dough.