Yes, I'm the guy who seasons his X instead of his Y, but it's not just me.
The traditional Italian way of making dried noodles is about two parts semolina flour,
one part water.
Knead, shape and dry.
That's it.
No salt in the dough.
Instead, you salt the boil water.
The pasta absorbs the salt and the water as it cooks and at the end, you have perfectly
seasoned pasta.
Why not cut out the middle man?
Why not just put salt directly into the dough?
Well, I have been researching that question for some time and I have found no clear answer
among the experts.
I do have a theory.
My thesis is pasta without salt is easier to make, especially when you're doing it the
old-school way, by hand, i.e. the way that the people who invented this style would've
done it.
I'll show you an experiment I did, the results of which I think support my thesis, but I
don't think the evidence is conclusive.
Plus, I'm just a guy in his kitchen with a camera.
In contrast, this is Dr. Frank Manthey at North Dakota State University.
He's the guy Taylor & Francis went to to co-write the pasta chapters in the Handbook of Food
Science, Technology, and Engineering.
This is one of those books they sell for nearly $2,000 because basically the only people who
want it are pasta manufacturers and that's a very small market of book buyers.
My point is, Dr. Manthey is one of the top people in this country whom the pasta industry
consults when they need scholarly expertise.
I asked him, why don't you put salt into the pasta dough?
"Well, because you don't have to."
That's it?
"Well, I mean, noodle products, they have salt."
He's talking there about Asian-style noodles.
Udon for example.
Noodle styles that generally have at least a little salt or sodium bicarb in the dough.
"There's not much difference between noodles and pasta.
It, I mean, adding salt affects the drying properties, the rate of drying, the ease of
drying."
As we can see in this 2014 paper from Chinese and Japanese scientists, salt in the dough
slows the rate of drying, which is kind of counterintuitive.
There are many things going on there, chemically, but one obvious thing is that salt is hygroscopic.
It absorbs water and holds onto it, which is going to slow drying.
So, yeah, from an industrial standpoint, you might leave the salt out of the dough because
then you can dry your product faster and time is money.
But Dr. Manthey says he doesn't think that's really the reason why there's no salt in pasta
dough.
"The key thing about quality is that the customer gets what they expect, and you don't need
to add salt to get what you expect when you eat a bowl full of spaghetti."
Yep.
Dr. Manthey thinks it's as simple as that.
Pasta manufacturers don't put salt into the dough, for dried pasta at least, because they
never have.
Because that's just the way it is and it's what people expect when they buy it.
Customers know there isn't any salt in here so they know to throw a lot of salt into the
water.
If the pasta suddenly had salt in it one day, people would end up over-seasoning their pasta
and probably end up blaming the manufacturer.
But all traditional practices have origins, right?
Even if those origins are lost in the mists of time, we can try to infer them.
Here's another thing Dr. Manthey mentioned.
"Salt helps toughen and strengthen the dough."
Right, and that sounds like a good thing.
It is a good thing in bread making, for example.
This is bread dough.
But let's think about this from the perspective of the first Italian pasta makers.
My hypothesis is that people mixing pasta dough in the olden days by hand, the hard
way, they would've noticed that a salted dough is considerably more time-consuming and harder
to bring together.
Experiment. 400 grams of semolina flour.
We'll talk another day about why that is the classic pasta flour.
In goes 200 grams of cool tap water.
Two-to-one is the classic dry-to-wet ratio for pasta.
People deviate from that in all kinds of ways but generally pasta is a very low-hydration
dough compared to bread.
It's a very dry dough and dry doughs take more physical force to knead, which I think
supports my hypothesis that this is all about ease of needing.
Anyway, I'm bringing this together in my stand mixer purely to standardize the experiment.
I'm using the number two setting and only the number two setting today.
After about four minutes, the dough comes together into a ball and then the paddle attachment
starts to struggle with it.
I'll have to stop and switch over to the kneading hook.
Here's the exact same experiment, but with a teaspoon of coarse salt in there.
This one took five minutes before the dough came together and the paddle attachment started
to struggle.
Part of that delay might simply have been the salt occupying some of the water.
Some of the water is dissolving salt instead of hydrating flour particles.
There's less water available to bring the flour together.
So this initial mixing phase takes a little longer.
20% longer, not a big deal.
Although maybe I would feel that 20% in my forearms if I was doing this the old-fashioned
way by hand.
Plus, we're not done yet.
We still have to actually knead the dough.
I think the salted dough is going to take longer to knead.
Why?
Because of how salt alters, or denatures, the native proteins in the wheat, which are
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So anyway, using the number two setting and the paddle attachment on the mixer, it took
four minutes for the no-salt dough to come together into a ball.
It took five minutes for the salted dough to come together into a ball.
Now let's switch on over to the hook, the dough hook, and actually get to kneading and
see what happens.
Just to be charitable, I'm going to restart the clock for this actual kneading phase with
the dough hook.
Salted dough is on the right.
Here we are after two minutes of proper kneading and let's test the dough for extensibility.
That's probably the main thing we look for in gluten development, right?
The ability to stretch without tearing.
Both doughs are still quite brittle.
Let's knead them again for another two minutes.
Boy, the salted dough on the right is visibly different, right?
It's way more crumbly, even after that extra minute of initial mixing that it had.
We're at four minutes total kneading with the dough hook.
Let's test again.
Both are still pretty brittle, but we're getting a little more stretch on the no-salt dough
on the left.
Give it another two minutes, six minutes of total kneading now.
No-salt dough on the left looks almost ready to me.
After eight total minutes with the dough hook on the number two mixer setting I think the
no-salt dough is done.
That's extensible enough that it'll be ready to roll out after a 20 or 30 minute rest.
It took me six more minutes to get the salted dough to a point that I was happy with.
That's on top of the additional minute of initial mixing that it required.
The no-salt dough required two thirds of the kneading time that the salted dough required.
That's a difference that you absolutely would feel in your forearms if you were doing this
by hand.
Now, granted, this is not a laboratory experiment that I did here, but generally you only need
laboratory precision to notice very, very small differences that would not be immediately
apparent to a normal person.
This is a big difference that was immediately apparent to me, a normal person in my kitchen.
I'm pretty sure it's something that people would have noticed when they were doing this
themselves the old-fashioned way back in the olden days.
So why, right?
Why does it take longer to knead pasta dough when it has salt in it?
Well, let's go back to the excellent book Bread Science by Dr. Emily Buehler linked
in the description.
The wheat proteins glutenin and gliadin, in their native state, are folded up on themselves
in little balls, and segregated from each other in individual flour particles.
When we introduce water, we activate protease enzymes that snip the proteins into pieces
and open them up, and the water allows everything to move around and get scrambled up with the
starch and fat and other stuff in the dough.
Water and protein bits bond with each other and create this solid stretchy web called
gluten, and that web traps everything else.
That's a developed dough, ready for shaping.
By themselves, the gluten proteins have a net-positive charge, which makes them inclined
to repel themselves and each other.
When you introduce salt, the sodium and chloride ions dissolve and negatively charged ions
link up with the positive charges on the proteins and neutralize that repelling force, thus
causing the gluten to tighten up.
Now, when your dough is finished, all mixed up and kneaded, you want the gluten to be
strong.
Strength is what's going to allow you to roll it out really, really thin into spaghetti,
for example, without it tearing.
But in the early stages, the very beginning of mixing when the gluten proteins are still
bound together in these little balls and they're stuck inside individual little flower particles,
at that stage, you want them to loosen up, and relax and open up so that they can envelope
all of the other stuff that's in that dough and bring it together into one coherent food
matrix, they would call it.
The initial delay in gluten development caused by salt does not matter so much when you're
making bread because bread doughs generally have a lot more water than pasta doughs, and
more water makes it easier to get a dough going.
If anything, high-hydration bread doughs without salt tend to be too sticky and messy to work
with.
Even then you will see lots of bread recipes that call for some initial autolyse or pre-ferment
step that leaves out the salt.
One of the reasons why they do that is salt delays gluten development.
It's also the case that making bread dough takes more time anyway, because you need time
for fermentation, right?
The yeast need time to puff up the dough.
That takes hours and that's plenty of time for the power of enzymes and water to develop
the gluten in that dough for you, basically knead it for you.
That initial delay that you get from the salt just doesn't matter as much in the end.
Pasta dough in contrast has no yeast.
It does not have to rise.
So it's generally made a lot faster.
You knead together the water and the flour, you let the dough rest for 20 minutes and
then you get to rolling.
In that faster timetable you really do feel that delay in gluten development caused by
salt.
Furthermore, I found that as I rolled out these two experimental pasta doughs by hand,
like they would've done it old school, the salted dough was a lot harder to roll.
Both doughs were very extensible, meaning I could stretch them out without tearing them,
but the salted dough was more elastic, meaning it snapped back on me after I rolled it out.
I would get it thin and then it would bunch right back up on me again.
I think this is due to the strengthening effect of the salt on gluten.
I'm sure a rolling machine or an extruder in a factory would be able to handle this
salty dough just fine.
But for me, doing it by hand, that's as thin as I was able to get the salty noodles.
Compare those to the noodles I rolled from a no salt dough.
Way thinner, which means they're going to dry faster for physical reasons — more surface
area for evaporation.
They're going to dry faster for chemical reasons too, because salt slows drying because it's
hygroscopic.
When we're talking about traditional no-egg, just salt and water Italian pasta dough, there's
really only one argument I can think to make for putting salt into the dough.
That is that salting the water instead is kind of wasteful.
You end up losing a lot of salt down the drain when you pour the water out.
But if you salted the pasta and not the water, you'd lose some salt down the drain anyway,
because a bunch of the salt in the pasta would dissolve out into the water during cooking.
The salinity of the water and the pasta will move toward equilibrium for as long as the
pasta is in there.
And hey, it's not like salt and salt water were particularly scarce resources in the
coastal society where this style of noodles developed.
So there you go.
There's the evidence supporting my thesis that Italian pasta dough evolved to be saltless
because saltless doughs are easier to make.
We haven't even talked about the corroding effect of salt on metal tools and machinery.
Maybe that was a factor.
Now, if I'm right, why did many styles of Asian noodles evolve to have at least some
salt in the dough?