Pasta & Pizza

Pasta & Pizza are about the same thing, namely what happens when flour meets water, yet differ in almost every part of the process.

Pasta is determined by the type of flour and how the dough is handled. Egg pasta from northern Italy requires soft wheat flour and rolling by hand with a mattarello, while dried pasta from the south is based on durum wheat and extrusion through bronze dies. Evan Funke learnt the craft in Bologna and documents it in American Sfoglino, where sfoglino means precisely the person who rolls pasta by hand. Marc Vetri examines hydration and flour types systematically, while The Geometry of Pasta tackles the underrated question of why a particular shape requires a particular sauce.

Pizza, by contrast, is determined by fermentation and heat. Neapolitan dough made with type 00 flour and a long cold fermentation is baked at 450 degrees in less than a minute, an entirely different process from an American pizza baked in a conventional oven.

Modernist Pizza by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya is the most comprehensive work ever produced on the subject, with more than 1,700 pages of measurements and tests.