I have bad news for you. You can make a crap version in Italy and ship it to the US (or Indonesia probably) You just can’t sell it in Italy if is isn’t made of some grade of flour. And it can contain all kinds of colors, additives and god-knows-what that is allowed in the US but not in the EU.
aak, I knew it! We’re now the kind of country that other countries send stuff to that’s not good enough for them, but good enough for us. That’s nice.
Italy takes its food and quality certifying bodies seriously. Quality exports have a certification symbol. Although this is far from foolproof, the poorer quality stuff is less likely to have those.
You’re not necessarily wrong in preferring Italian food imported from Italy, it’s just not a guarantee of quality. For instance, the imported Italian ravioli I recently discovered is nicer than the domestic stuff I used to get. For one thing, the ravioli dumplings are well sealed and always stay intact when cooked, whereas the cheap crap sometimes leaks when being cooked. But the imported stuff carries the President’s Choice label, which as previously noted is a premium store brand whose Italian food offerings are generally pretty good.
AFAIK, the only certifications are IGP (Indicazione Geografica Protetta) and DOP (Denominazione d’Origine Protetta). Yes, those definitely tend to be linked to quality, but they refer to the fact that the product was produced in a particular geographic region and may also certify production in accordance with traditional methods, but that doesn’t apply to all products. You can still have fine products without those geographic certifications. It’s not quite like, say, the VQA designation for Ontario wines, or, I think, the DOC designation for Italian wines, which are more like quality markers rather than geographic ones. I would never, for instance, buy an Ontario wine that wasn’t labeled VQA – that’s a minimum standard.
I don’t think there’s any generic certification on imported Italian food that just certifies “this is good stuff that meets our quality standards”. But that’s just my superficial understanding, correct me if I’m wrong.
In case anyone cares, Rana pasta is a very popular pasta brand in Italy - what Italians buy when they don’t feel like cooking. My Italian teacher sent me an article about it (to translate from Italian and discuss). She asked me if I’d seen it here, and indeed I had.
No idea what the differences between what they sell in the US and in Italy might be, but this brand isn’t difficult to find. There’s a local brand here called Melina’s that I like better, but Rana is certainly less expensive.
If it doesn’t say, it’s almost certainly teflon. Bronze drawn pasta will usually advertise that fact.
I never considered Barilla to be a particularly “fancy” brand, just a bog standard middle of the road name brand pasta. DeCecco is what I would consider to be the entry level fancy pasta, as they are bronze drawn and slow dried.
This YouTuber did some experiments. In his opinion it is worth it to pay the extra few dollars for the bronze drawn stuff.