Pastas in our way!
This list includes types of pasta from culinary traditions around the world.
Some pasta varieties are uniquely regional and not widely known; some types may have different names in different languages, or sometimes in the same language. For example, the cutrotelle is also called ruote in Italy and “wagon wheels” in the United States. Manufacturers and cooks often invent new shapes of pasta; or may invent new names for old shapes for marketing reasons.
Italian pasta names often end with the masculine plural suffixes -ini, -elli, -illi, -etti or the feminine plurals -ine, -elle etc., all conveying the sense of “little”; or with -oni, -one, meaning “large”. Many other suffixes like -otti (“largish”) and -acci (“rough”, “badly made”) may occur, too. In Italian, all pasta type names are plural.
East Asian noodles originated in China and spread into neighboring countries such as Korea and Japan (dangmyeon and ramen, for example, are both of Chinese origin), as well as Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Cambodia.
The dough for East Asian noodles can be made from wheat, rice, buckwheat, or mung bean starch. Egg, lye, and cereal may also be added to noodles made from wheat flour in order to give the noodles a different color or flavor. Arrowroot or tapioca starch are sometimes added to the flour mixture in low quantities to change the texture and tenderness of the noodles’ strands.
