Home cooks, including myself, often wonder why pasta at Italian restaurants tastes so much better than pasta made at home. It’s never too slippery, and its sauce, no matter how silky or chunky, seems to cling to every piece or long strand. The rusticity of handmade pasta dough helps explain some of these qualities, as does the skill of a seasoned pasta cook. But not all pasta served at restaurants is freshly made — in fact, many restaurant pasta dishes start with dried pasta.
A few years ago, I started noticing that some of the packaged pasta I was buying was labeled “bronze die cut,” “bronze cut” or “bronze die pasta.” I didn’t think much of it until recently, when I was developing and testing a recipe for Lemony Cacio e Pepe.
The first time I made the dish, I used spaghetti I had in my pantry from San Francisco-based Flour + Water. It worked without a hitch, the grated cheese and pepper melting evenly into a sauce in the pan with the hot pasta, coating it like a silken sheath. The second time I made it, I used store-brand spaghetti, and I thought I had done something wrong. The cheese and pepper formed small, chewy clumps, and no matter how much I stirred, or how much reserved pasta water I added, the ingredients refused to smooth out into a sauce.
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I tried the recipe with a few other brands of pasta, and those tests seemed to make clear that bronze-die-cut pasta made a noticeable difference in how well my sauce and pasta came together.
So I called Thomas McNaughton and Ryan Pollnow, co-chefs of the restaurants Flour + Water and Penny Roma in San Francisco, and the team behind Flour + Water’s packaged pasta line.
McNaughton and Pollnow explained that most packaged pasta starts as a simple mix of flour and water. After mixing and resting, a mechanical extruder pushes the dough through dies of different shapes, and then it’s cut at set intervals. The shape of the die corresponds to the final shape of the pasta: spaghetti or linguine, rigatoni or penne, radiatori or rotelle.
“While bronze dies were the industry standard for years, they’ve largely been replaced by Teflon dies,” McNaughton says. That’s because Teflon dies are cheaper to make and easier to use and replace. They also produce more pasta, faster, because the dough slides through them more quickly. Pasta extruded through Teflon dies has a smooth, almost satiny surface. This might look nice, but it doesn’t make the best plate of pasta.
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“Bronze is a porous and soft metal, and because of that, pasta dough extruded through it comes out textured and a little rough,” says McNaughton. “It helps the sauce cling, so that when you’re making a pasta dish, it’s not noodles surrounded by sauce — the dish has harmony.”
Italians value this harmony, so their bronze-cut pasta is always labeled “al bronzo.”
Share this articleShareThat rough exterior texture helps the home cook, too. Most bronze-die-cut pasta is slow dried, which forms a sturdier, less-brittle product, reducing the chances of breakage in the box, on your shelf or in your pasta pot.
As you cook the pasta in salted boiling water, some of its coarse exterior will slough off into the water, turning that water cloudy and extra starchy. Lots of pasta recipes, including my own, instruct you to save some of that pasta water. Its starchiness acts a little like glue, helping to marry the cooked pasta with your sauce. Teflon-die-cut pasta releases far less starch into the water as it cooks.
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When it’s time to stir your sauce into the pasta, McNaughton and Pollnow say bronze-die-cut pasta’s irregular surface grabs onto the sauce. “It helps the sauce stick to the noodle,” Pollnow says. “You’re looking for a harmonious marriage of pasta and sauce, and you get that with bronze-die pasta every time.”
Finally, bronze-die-cut pasta “provides better texture that makes for a better bowl of pasta,” Pollnow notes. “It has this bite to it that you don’t get when you eat Teflon-die pasta.” Personally, I was surprised that I could actually taste the difference.
Some even say that a well-made pasta dish, where the noodles and sauce have become one, isn’t going to splatter around the table and onto your shirt as you pick up a forkful. The sauce is more likely to stay pretty neatly attached to the pasta.
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The only issue is that bronze-die-cut pasta is generally more expensive. But McNaughton and Pollnow point out that because of the way it’s produced — including the fact that it’s slow-dried — bronze-die pasta results in less waste, because it’s less likely to break. Even better? “Bronze-die pasta accentuates the al dente texture you’re looking for,” McNaughton says. “It’s more enjoyable to eat — and cook.”
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