Nonnas know how to make pasta. The rest of us have to do the best we can.

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The last time I checked there were 822 million results on Google for how to make pasta. This is a really large number. To count to 822 million would take you 26 years. To spend 822 million dollars, you would need to spend $10,000 a day for 225 years.

It also means that, theoretically, roughly 10% of the humans currently living on this planet have published a page on how to make pasta.

Given the coverage you might expect there to be some good advice. But, even though I didn’t check all 822 million pages, I was a little disappointed.

There was a lot of lyrical waxing about the benefits of fresh pasta, stories about nonnas and reminiscences of sun-drenched hillsides. What I didn’t find were many explanations of why you need to do the things they were saying you had to do to get good pasta.

Nonna stories are great, but why do you need to do all this kneading and rolling? Why should or shouldn’t you add olive oil or salt? Why do you rest the dough? Were people just making all this up as they went along?

I suspect the reason for this is that the explanations involve protein chemistry and not many people are aware of the chemistry they are performing when they make pasta. I also think people want to read about nonnas more than they want to read about protein chemistry. Which is fair enough.

But if you have an interest in pasta making, it’s worth investing some time in learning about the chemistry of pasta. If only so you can make sense of the all the contradictory advice you get in between the nonna stories.

So here it is, the 822,000,001st page on how to make pasta. The one where I try to explain the chemistry of pasta.

Making Pasta is All About Gluten

In one respect the science of pasta is simple. Just about everything you do when you are making pasta has one goal: to develop a robust gluten network that gives your dough some strength and chewiness.

Gluten is a molecule that you find in any flour that is made from wheat, barley, rye and a few other rare grains. Gluten is important in these flours because, as we’ll see, the more that you develop the gluten while making your dough the stronger and chewier your dough will be.

All the kneading, resting and rolling that you do when making pasta is directly related to this goal of developing gluten. Whenever you add something to your pasta dough, like olive oil and salt for example, you also need to consider what effect they will have on your gluten and so the strength of your dough. It is all about the gluten.

Pasta is actually a good place to start learning about gluten. For things like cakes and shortbread you want to limit gluten development, no one wants a chewy cake. For breads you want some strength in your dough but not so much that your bread is too chewy. With pasta you don’t need to fiddle around with oxidisers, shortenings or fancy techniques for the fine control of gluten development you just want to develop that gluten.

So What Exactly is Gluten?

Gluten is a network of proteins that develops when you add water to flour. The two major proteins are called glutenin and gliadin and both of them are insoluble in water. Protein chemists say that they are hydrophobic, i.e. scared of water.

When water is added to flour the glutenin proteins, that are long and ribbon-like, don’t like interacting with the water so they start interacting with each other. Much the same way that droplets of oil in water clump together. These associations result in long bundles of glutenin that are stabilised by chemical interactions between the individual glutenin molecules.

Gliaden is also hydrophobic but, unlike glutenin, it is what scientists call a globular protein. The protein chain is folded in on itself so it is more like a ball of wool. Gliaden also doesn’t much like water so when water is added it ends up joining up with the glutenin to get away from the water.

Gliaden is crucial to gluten development because it interacts only weakly with the glutenin molecules. This means that gliaden can act as a lubricant allowing the long glutenin chains to slide past one another. Without gliaden the much stronger glutenin-glutenin interactions would prevent any movement. The dough would just be a stiff unworkable mass of coagulated protein.

But How Do You Develop Gluten?

When we talk about developing gluten what we are talking about is getting a gluten network that is organised into long aligned glutenin strands. When your gluten is like this the protein strands can act like little springs that make your dough elastic.

This is why we knead, rest and roll out the dough. When we initially add water and spend ten minutes or so kneading the dough we are making the first pass at stretching out the gluten and getting it all aligned. As we do this we are straightening out various kinks and coils in the new gluten network.

Then we want to give the dough some time to rest. We do this so the water can fully hydrate the flour but also to give the gluten some time to relax and reform some of those kinks and coils we stretched out while kneading. These kinks and coils restore some of the elasticity of the dough that it didn’t have when the gluten was fully extended. This makes the rested dough easier to work and less likely to tear.

Finally, we want to roll out the dough. Nonnas do this with a long skinny rolling pin but most of us use a pasta machine, folding the dough upon itself as we go. This rolling out is a final adjustment to the elasticity of the dough, to make shaping easier, but it also forces out any air bubbles that can interfere with your protein interactions, weakening your dough.

That’s it, you should now have some well made pasta dough good enough to impress friends and family.

It Can’t Be That Simple, Can It?

If you think I’ve made making pasta sound too simple you are dead right. It takes a lot of experience to master the technique and know when to stop. Science can’t help you much there, you just need to practice. Or consult a nonna.

What science can help with is understanding how some of the factors that I’ve glossed over so far can affect your pasta. So lets go through some of those now.

Choice of Flour

Since gluten makes dough strong and gluten is made of flour proteins, it follows that flours with a larger protein content will allow you to make a stronger dough.

Durum wheat, or semolina, has the highest protein content, between 12-15%, and so makes the strongest flour. It’s also yellow so you can make a nice looking, strong pasta using just flour and water. The majority of the dried pasta you find in the supermarket is made of durum wheat for just that reason. Manufacturers only need add water to flour.

Italian and Chinese traditions

The differences between the Italian and Chinese noodle and dumpling traditions sometimes comes down to the types of flour available to the cooks in these areas. In Italy access to strong semolina enabled the development of dried pasta and the creation of a wide variety of shaped pasta, although softer fresh pastas where also developed using bread flour. In China noodles and dumplings were made from flours with much lower protein content leading to a rich fresh noodle and dumpling tradition, also with a much higher salt content which, as we have seen, stabilises the weaker gluten network.

Also Marco Polo definitely did not bring pasta to Italy, there was pasta in Italy centuries before then, but the Chinese were definitely many centuries ahead of the rest of the world when it came to making noodles and dumplings from wheat flour.

You can make a perfectly good pasta with all purpose flour but it’s worth keeping an eye on the protein content. All purpose ’00’ flours have plenty of protein, usually around 12% protein, but at 10%, and certainly below this, you might have trouble getting a really strong dough. Fine if you are going for a delicate noodle but I wouldn’t want to be making ravioli with such a fragile dough.

Flour Type	Protein Content	Gluten Strength	Ideal Culinary Application
Durum Wheat / Semolina	12% – 15%	Very Strong	Commercial dried pasta, shaped varieties
All-Purpose ’00’ Flour	~12%	Moderate-Strong	Soft fresh pasta, robust dumpling wrappers
Standard All-Purpose Flour	Below 10%	Weak / Fragile	Delicate noodles (unsuitable for ravioli)

Fats and Oils

You may have heard of ‘shortening’ a dough. To shorten a dough you simply add an oil or a fat (I’ll just say oil from now on as a fat is just an oil that is solid at room temperature). You usually do this in baking when you are trying to make something light and delicate. So, you’ll find a shortened dough in the production of things like cakes, pies crusts, scones and, sometimes, breads.

Oils have this affect because they interact with the gluten in the dough. I think we all know that oil and water don’t mix. They don’t mix because, like the proteins in gluten, oil is hydrophobic, it doesn’t like water (there’s a much more scientific explanation of this here).

When you add oil and water to flour, the oil will naturally associate with the hydrophobic proteins in gluten rather than the water. The oil will be distributed in-between the proteins in the gluten and will prevent them from forming the chemical bonds that holds the gluten together. Weakening the gluten like this means you end up with a lighter and more delicate dough.

Strengthening the gluten is the whole reason that you knead your dough so much when you are making pasta, so it seems counter-productive to add some olive oil and shorten the dough you spent so much time trying to strengthen.

One the other hand, if you do want a more delicate pasta then adding an oil will give you just that. But once again, you might be making your life harder if you add olive when making ravioli or tortellini. This is also the reason that egg pasta is ‘silkier’ than dried pasta, made from durum wheat and water, the fats in the egg yolks are shortening your dough.

Salt

Salt has the exact opposite effect on pasta than oils. Salt strengthens a dough and, once again, it is all about the gluten.

All proteins have areas on their surface that have an electrical charge, either positive or negative (I explain this more rigorously here). When the areas on the gluten proteins that have the same charge are near each other the charges will repel forcing the proteins apart.

Salt is an ionic compound which means it is composed of charged atoms of opposite charge. Salt is made up of negative sodium atoms (Na^–) and positive chlorine atoms (Cl⁺), and when you add salt to your dough the ions will dissociate in water and neutralise the charged areas on the gluten proteins.

Neutralising these charges allows the gluten proteins to associate more tightly as there are no charges left to repel each other. If we’ve learnt nothing else so far we’ve learnt that stronger gluten equals stronger dough.

Acid

Acids can also affect the charges that you find on the surface of proteins or, if you want to sound like a scientist, alter the electrostatic potential of a protein. Unlike salt though, acid generally acts to weaken your dough.

Acids, and bases, are an incredibly important topic, in science and in cooking, but for now we should just note that if we change the pH of a solution any charges on the surface of proteins in that solution will be changed.

In general, if you lower the pH, by adding an acid, you promote the formation of positive charges on the protein. If you lower the pH, by adding a base, you promote negative charges. Either proteins will end up having a lot of the same charge on their surface.

If proteins have a lot of similar charges they’ll repel each other because like charges repel. We’ve been here before. If you add acid and your gluten proteins start repelling each other the gluten network weakens.

This isn’t really a consideration for pasta dough, I haven’t seen a single recipe suggesting the addition of an acid, but it does become a consideration when baking, for example, sourdough where the sourdough starter is acidic and can weaken the gluten network.

Ingredient / Process	Chemical Action	Effect on Dough
Water Activation	Combines hydrophobic glutenin and gliadin	Initializes the base gluten network
Kneading & Rolling	Straightens kinks; aligns ribbon-like strands	Develops structural strength and spring
Dough Resting	Relaxes protein chains; ensures complete hydration	Restores elasticity, prevents tearing
Sodium Chloride (Salt)	Charged ions neutralise repulsive surface charges	Compacts proteins tightly for stronger dough
Oils / Fats (Egg Yolks)	Distributes between hydrophobic strands	Prevents chemical bonding, creates silkier texture
Acids	Alters pH to prompt uniform surface charges	Generates repulsive force, weakening the network

Conclusion

For something that involves mixing two ingredients, flour and water, there is a lot to going on in pasta. I’ve skimmed over a lot of details but in general as long as you realise that pasta is all about gluten you are on your way to understanding whats going on when you make pasta.

Will that make you great at making pasta? Probably not, I suspect that it just takes a lifetime of practice. Being a protein chemist myself, I can’t honestly say that all this knowledge has stopped me stuffing up. It’s helped a lot working out how I stuffed up, so I guess that’s something. Mostly, with a better grasp of the chemistry, you are in a much better position when you are wading through those 822, 000, 001 posts about pasta.