We often get asked ‘what is bronze cut pasta?’, so we thought we could answer that question for you here.
Bronze cut pasta is often pasta that is made using durum wheat semolina flour. This is because semolina flour allows the pasta to maintain its shape and it can be dried. This is very important as there is a demand for so many different shapes and forms of pasta, from spaghetti to fusilli.
So-called bronze dies are bare metal bronze plates that have especially cut areas that form the dough into particular shaped pastas. Here is one example:
This is a bronze dies that fits our particular sized pasta machine.
This particular die has been made especially to shape CAMPANELLE.
The pasta dough is shaped by forcing it to extrude through the specially cut areas of the bronze die, to form each of the pasta shapes. As the pasta is extruded, friction and heat are created. It is in forcing of the dough through these very small openings , that gives the dough its rough texture.
Bronze cut pasta has a rough texture that cannot be achieved when using plastic (teflon) pasta dies or indeed by making pasta by hand. The results are the difference between a rough or smooth surface. If you are making pasta by hand or extruding through a teflon die, it is well to know that a smooth pasta will hold a sauce very differently.
While making pasta by hand, we employ a few techniques to help give each piece of pasta some sort of texture. For example, working through the photos below: adding shapes to otherwise flat pasta, stretching the dough into shapes (orecchietti), using a wooden surface or inventing shapes that will help hold the sauce, like our assortment of floral pasta.
The texture of pasta extruded through a bronze die is like a very fine sand paper. This texture makes the pasta more porous and better able to hold sauces. On a microscopic level, it makes the surface area of the pasta larger.
With pasta that is extruded through a bronze die, not only is the texture different, there is the added benefit of being able to create ridged pasta. The rougher the texture of the pasta, the easier the sauce will hold and be absorbed. This means that the pasta itself becomes a very important ingredient and not just a filler.
Bronze cut pasta is the gold standard for producing the most flavorful and texture-rich pasta dishes.