High-quality dried pasta is widely available and quick to prepare, so why make your own?
This was the first question I put to Katie Leaird, a former America’s Test Kitchen editor and current food writer and pasta-making instructor who studied her craft in Italy. Without hesitation, she replied: “Because fresh pasta is a completely different food.” The texture of a fresh noodle, she insisted, is chewy in a way that’s impossible to replicate with one that’s been dried.
You should also make pasta by hand—no food processor, no mechanical roller, not even a rolling pin—simply because you can. The tactile experience of pasta “fatto a mano,” or handmade pasta, is a meditative way to pass an hour or two, and it rewards you with a hearty meal, particularly when you’re making pici (pronounced “PEE-chee,” or sometimes “PEE-shee”), the long, wonderfully chewy strands that have been rolled out on Tuscan tables since Etruscan times. Pici are inherently frugal too—a prime example of
