Grace Wong/ABC(NEW YORK) — Ease and affordability make pasta a perennial favorite, but today artisans have turned this humble pantry staple into nouvelle cuisine.
By using ingredients like spring water, quality semolina flour and pushing the dough through a bronze extruder, a pound of gourmet spaghetti could cost 10 times more than the average price of supermarket spaghetti. But does pricier mean tastier?
ABC News’ Good Morning America asked Luca Donofrio, head pasta maker at Eataly in New York City, to create a blind taste test comparing dried spaghetti at three different price points: $1, $2.50 and $10 a pound.
Donofrio cooked the pasta and dressed it simply with olive oil and garlic, and we invited three experts, or “nonnas” (that’s Italian for grandmother), to take our taste test. The “nonnas” were asked to pick their favorite and which one they thought was the most expensive.
It was a three-way split vote for favorite, and a split vote again for the most expensive, but Nonna Romana Sciddurlo chose the pasta labeled “C” as her favorite and the most expensive.
Sciddurlo, like the other grandmothers who took the test, considers herself a pasta connoisseur — she makes her own pasta and has had her recipes featured in her granddaughter’s cookbook called Cooking with Nonna.
The pasta Sciddurlo chose? The pasta that cost $1 a pound, showing tasty doesn’t have to be expensive.
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