Choose Better Store-Bought Pasta With An Easy Visual Test

Pasta is one of the best items to have stocked up in your pantry for a night when you're not sure what to make for dinner. It's perfect with a simple sauce, some veggies mixed in, or with the protein of your choice. The options are truly limitless, which helps explain why there are so many pasta recipes that never get old.

But before you even get to the point of debating what type of pasta to make at home, there's one very simple but important trick you can use at the grocery store to determine which are the best quality pastas to buy. All you have to do is look at the texture of the noodles. If they have a rough and porous look to them (as opposed to a smooth texture), they're going to give you a much more delicious final product. Pasta with rough edges is likely "bronze cut," meaning it was purposefully made with that textured exterior to help it grab onto sauce better. The texture also helps the noodles not slip off your fork, and helps create another layer to every bite, no matter the recipe.

"Bronze dies" were the standard way to make pasta for centuries. But then Teflon came around, making for a lot cheaper and quicker way to mass produce dried pasta. However (and no surprise here), a cheaper and quicker option actually reduced the quality of the final product, especially because Teflon dies make smooth, satiny pasta by pushing it through a lot quicker and more effortlessly. On the other hand, bronze itself is a softer, porous metal, which makes pasta more rough when it's pushed through it. Bronze cut pasta is also typically slow dried, which creates a less brittle and more sturdy end product.

So, the next time you're in the market for pasta, first decide whether to get fresh pasta or dried pasta. If you decide to get dried pasta, keep an eye on the textures of each of the noodles you're considering, as we've been discussing. But there are a few other things to look for as well. First, check out the ingredients list, where less is more. Higher quality pastas typically only contain durum wheat and water (and sometimes egg). Keep an eye on the color, too. If pasta is bright yellow, it was likely dried quickly at a high temperature. Ideally, you want pasta that's a pale yellow, which means it dried naturally (or at a slower rate, anyway).