Precooked was changed since it seemed confusing (not really talking about frozen dinners or leftovers). Not sure parched solves that problem, though it’s better’n what I had. Possibly. Probably. Perhaps.
If bronze is so good, where is the diamond cut? This pasta was cut by a tool so sharp that it takes all the sauce from the surrounding tables….
Amazing alliterative appellations aft gang agly. 
I guess it depends on where the restaurant wants to spend time. Making fresh pasta each day is part of the prep before the restaurant opens (or made the night before) and can take a fair amount of work. But, once that fresh pasta is good to go, the cooking time is much faster than it is for dried pasta (2-3 minutes versus 10-12 minutes).
Once I started buying bronze for pasta, I haven’t gone back. I also go for brands with lighter color pasta, which usually indicates slower drying times. DeCecco is my usual easy-to-find brand.
What is the difference in cost between cheap bronze and something else? For a big company, I can’t see that as an enormous difference?
As I noted above, I don’t think the extra cost is in the bronze, but rather in the extra time taken to dry the pasta.
It may be that bronze wears out faster than teflon or stainless steel or whatever, so there is a small increased cost.
When all is said and done, just buy a bunch and try them out for yourself. You might not notice a difference; you might not care if there is a difference. I find that’s the only way I can really learn. I can get a bunch of opinions, but about half my opinions differ from, say, what Cook’s Illustrated judges to be the best. (I especially had problems with them under Christopher Kimball especially when it came to anything involving spice.)
Extra time could be baked into the process though. Once allotted, does it really make that much difference in cost? They aren’t adding anything and the difference in time is measured in (fractions of) hours? If not for longer drying, would the volume of pasta they could make double and would that transfer into higher profits? I can see high temperatures maybe affecting structure, but surely there are well studied sweet spots?
Pretty much any “dried” spaghetti works for me, though my go-to is Barilla.
This subject dredges up memories of when I lived in small-town Iowa and the only spaghetti brands sold at the local Hy-Vee supermarket were Budget and American Beauty, cheap tasteless pasta that (particularly Budget) stuck together in a pale glutinous mass no matter how carefully you cooked it . I see that American Beauty is still being sold in some places but have no desire to revisit old nightmares.
I mostly buy Barilla and DeCecco. I have no idea what implements they use to extrude or cut the pasta. But they seem to have a larger “sweet spot” between being cooked enough that my husband will eat them, and turning to mush. I assume they use different flour than the brands I’ve had worse luck with.
Always. If you spend twice as much time to produce something, you are cutting production by half.
This thread is making me think about the difference (generally) between Americans and Italians when it comes to what we want out of a bowl of pasta. Americans (generally) are really into sauce, and a lot of it. Italians (generally) think of sauce as something you use to lightly dress your pasta, kind of like the way you’d (properly) dress a salad. It shouldn’t be swimming in dressing.
So if you are all about the sauce, the pasta won’t matter as much. If you dig pasta, then the flavor and texture of it wiill matter a lot more as part of the overall dish.
It’s also making me think about a Japanese chef I took a sushi class from, who talked a lot about the rice. To him, the quality and texture of the rice was the most important thing in making sushi, along with the freshness of the fish. Not being very much into rice, it was very hard for me to understand that.
Sushi is really all about the rice. I have watched a few shows on sushi preparation and the masters of the art usually spend something like two years just learning to make the rice correctly. IIRC “sushi” means “sour” in Japanese and it is the vinegared rice that makes it sour.
For example, sashimi is not sushi because there is no rice.
Yes! And that is lost on me. I only had Minute Rice growing up, I am not a fan of rice now (other than risotto), and that makes it really hard for me to grok the whole thing.
Here is a gift link to a Washington Post article from April 2023 about why bronze dies are better than the Teflon used by most brands.
“While bronze dies were the industry standard for years, they’ve largely been replaced by Teflon dies,” McNaughton says. That’s because Teflon dies are cheaper to make and easier to use and replace. They also produce more pasta, faster, because the dough slides through them more quickly. Pasta extruded through Teflon dies has a smooth, almost satiny surface. This might look nice, but it doesn’t make the best plate of pasta.
“Bronze is a porous and soft metal, and because of that, pasta dough extruded through it comes out textured and a little rough,” says McNaughton. “It helps the sauce cling, so that when you’re making a pasta dish, it’s not noodles surrounded by sauce — the dish has harmony.”
Teflon, left, Bronze, right.
Yes and no. If there was enough market to sustain unlimited production, you could add more machines but rates would still be less. If there is a sequential process ABCDE, making E longer might not effect ABCD and so it’s effect on production time might be more nuanced.
Still, I’m gonna assume these guys know more about drying pasta than I do. I guess drying time and using better tools are worth some extra cost. But if you just gave me pasta not sure I could really tell these had been used.
Yeah. In any pipelined or continuous production system, making a step take longer need have zero impact on total daily throughput. It just takes a longer at startup to load the longer pipeline. But once the pipeline is loaded, stuff goes in the input end and comes out the output end at the same rate regardless of the physical or temporal length of that pipeline.
If you were doing this at home in batches and had limited drying rack space that would be a completely different situation. Which is why continuous production is so powerful and batch-based production is so antiquated and inefficient for anything that can be pipelined.
And also, the plant needs to be physically larger to accommodate that extra length of drying rack. (Moving, pipeline-y drying rack.) So they pay a little more in rent/taxes/maintenance. But probably not a lot more.
Now I’m curious what factors DO matter in why some pastas are less prone to turning into mush than others. Also
(Runs to find link…)