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IF YOU see someone making pasta on a cooking show, they are usually mixing white flour with egg yolks, then rolling the dough out thinly with a machine. This is one way to do it, but most pasta isn鈥檛 made from flour and eggs 鈥� and you don鈥檛 need any special gadgets to make it.

Most Italian pasta is made from a different wheat to the kind ordinary flour comes from. Called durum wheat (Triticum durum), it thrives in drier regions like southern Italy, and it gets its name from the Latin word for hard. The kernels appear glass-like, or vitreous, and when milled they tend to fracture into pieces, rather than becoming fine particles like flour. This produces semolina, which has a sand-like coarse texture. It gets its yellow colour from carotenoid pigments.

The coarseness of semolina has . When grains are finely milled, the starch granules get cracked. This is good for bread-baking, since enzymes can more easily break the starch down into simple sugars that yeast can ferment. But when you make pasta from finely milled flour, more of the starch leaks out during cooking, making the pasta sticky. The cracked starch granules in flour also absorb more water, which isn鈥檛 ideal if you鈥檙e making dried pasta, since it means more energy is needed to dehydrate it.

When pasta is made from white flour, egg is usually added to the dough. This provides colour and richness, as well as extra protein, which makes the dough more cohesive and helps keep the starch in during cooking. Egg makes the pasta more perishable, so this is mainly used for fresh pasta.

Durum wheat has a high protein content, which means the pasta keeps its shape well when cooked and has a good bite to it. But it is harder to roll thin, so egg and flour tend to be used for filled pasta.

Orecchiette, or 鈥渓ittle ears鈥� (pictured above), are a type of pasta made from semolina in Puglia, Italy. To make the dough, add the water to the semolina in a bowl and mix with a fork. Once combined, tip onto a work surface and knead the dough for about 8 minutes, until it is smooth, elastic and not sticky. Cover with a towel and let it rest for about 30 minutes.

Then, cut off a piece of dough and roll it into a cylinder, 1.5 centimetres thick. Cut this into pieces 1 centimetre wide. Drag a butter knife across each piece, pulling towards you to stretch it thin, then turn it inside out 鈥� it may help to watch to learn this technique. Place the pieces on a tray sprinkled with semolina, so they don鈥檛 stick together. Leave them to dry slightly, for at least an hour. Then they are ready to cook, or they can be left to dry more fully for a day or two.

Cook in salted water for 6 minutes or longer, depending on how long they were left to dry. When the pasta is cooked to your liking, drain and mix with sauce.

Sam Wong is assistant news editor and self-appointed chief gourmand at New Scientist. Follow him @samwong1

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