Spaghetti has become an iconic dish in more than one way. Pasta, for one, is what people think of spaghetti when they hear the word. Italian cuisine, for another, is what people think of where spaghetti comes from. Learn more about this fantastic dish with these 30 spaghetti facts.
The basic ingredients for the dough include only pasta flour and water. The resulting ball of dough is rolled into a long, sausage-like shape, before getting pulled by the ends to make it thinner. Then, bringing the ends together to form a loop. After which pull apart the loop into two new sausage-like rolls. The process repeats until the pasta reaches the desired thinness. Finally, the spaghetti noodles are hung up to dry.
Alternatively, cutting sheets could just cut noodles out of the dough, or the dough could get fed into a hand-rolled pasta machine. A pasta machine would force the dough against a filter with many small holes, forcing the dough to come out in its final, spaghetti form.
Even factory-produced spaghetti noodles use simple processes to make.
They are made using the same principles as hand-rolled pasta machines have, only on a much larger scale. That said, they also include special equipment to maintain an even mix of ingredients when preparing the flour, to maintain an even quality of the final product.
Industrial spaghetti production also requires water cooling systems to keep the noodles from overheating and spoiling. It also requires moisture control to balance the degree of dryness the noodles have. On one hand, the noodles need enough dryness to keep them from sticking together, but too much dryness would cause them to crumble. Packaging materials vary from simple paper wrappings to plastic bags and boxes.
Some spaghetti noodles use different ingredients.
These include whole-wheat and multigrain flour, both of which produce noodles with higher fiber content than ordinary pasta flour. Most commercially-available spaghetti noodles also use enriched pasta flour to increase their nutritional value. In fact, nutritionists recommend using enriched flour, as the process of milling grain to make flour reduces its vitamin and mineral content.
Specialist noodles also exist, including ingredients such as cheese, mushrooms, spinach, tomatoes, and various herbs and spices to add flavor to the noodles even without a sauce. Other noodles substitute pasta flour with rice flour, cornflour, or even potato flour. These noodles are marketed to people suffering from various gluten-related disorders, such as coeliac disease or wheat allergy.
The simplicity of cooking spaghetti noodles varies.
The general process simply involves boiling the noodles in salt-seasoned water until it softens, before draining them using a colander. Traditionally, spaghetti gets cooked al dente, or “to the tooth” in Italian, meaning cooked while keeping a firm texture. However, noodles cooked longer produce a softer consistency, something that nutritionists argue against. The digestive system finds it harder to process soft pasta and even extracts fewer nutrients from it.
The cooking time for spaghetti noodles varies with its thickness, with thicker noodles taking longer and thinner noodles taking shorter. Angel hair pasta typically takes the quickest time to cook, only between two and six minutes long. In contrast, spaghettoni can take up to 12 minutes to cook, while most spaghetti noodles only need around 10 minutes to cook.
Spaghetti has several common variants.
Traditional Italian spaghetti involves noodles served with tomato sauce, simply seasoned with various herbs like basil and oregano. It also features ground cheese on top, usually Parmesan, but other hard cheeses like Pecorino Romano and Grana Padano may substitute for Parmesan.
Carbonara makes up another common variant of the spaghetti dish and a very popular one at that. In fact, it’s the iconic white sauce spaghetti dish, with the sauce made from eggs, cheese, bacon, and seasoned with black pepper.
Common variants of the traditional tomato sauce, though, include Amatriciana sauce. It takes its name from the town of Amatrice in Italy and features a tomato-based sauce including cured pork cheek, Pecorino Romano cheese, and onions.
Spaghetti Bolognese isn’t actually an Italian dish.
It takes its name from the Bolognese sauce served with the noodles, featuring a tomato-based sauce cooked with ground meat. The sauce takes its name from the Italian city of Bologna, but Italians never serve it with spaghetti noodles, and with flat pasta instead.
Serving it with noodles only became popular in the USA, with Italians seeing it as an inauthentic dish as a result. In fact, this has led some sources to refer to Spaghetti Bolognese as American spaghetti instead. Regardless, American cultural domination has led this variant of spaghetti to become iconic worldwide. A popular variant of this dish replaces the ground meat in the sauce with meatballs instead, leading to the name of spaghetti and meatballs.
The Filipino spaghetti is a derivation of the American spaghetti.
Its distinctive features are sliced hotdogs added to the sauce and either sugar or banana ketchup to make it sweeter. The use of banana ketchup goes back to WWII when the Japanese occupation resulted in a sugar shortage in the Philippines. This led to the development of banana ketchup as a sugar substitute, which remained popular in the country even after the war.
The use of the sweetened sauce and the addition of hotdogs make Filipino spaghetti very inauthentic to Italian diners. However, it remains very popular in the Philippines. Critics generally attribute this to the Filipino fondness for sweet dishes and recipes.
Naples has its unique variant of spaghetti, spaghetti aglio e olio.
Its name literally means spaghetti with garlic and olive oil, referring to the dish’s other ingredients beside spaghetti noodles. A staple of Neapolitan cuisine, it enjoys widespread popularity not just in Italy, but worldwide. Critics attribute its popularity to its simple ingredients, as well as the dish’s ease of preparation.
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