When the humans discovered agriculture, they also invented bread and pasta. Actually, pasta is a kind of “bread” made by flour and water. Opposite bread, pasta is a flat strips or small squares.
Italy is generally regarded as the home of pasta products. In the fifteenth century, Italians learned how to make noodles from the Germans, who had previously learned the process in their travels to Asia.
In the 1500s dry pasta manufacturers were founded all over the Italy. The dough was mixed by foot and compressed by 3-4 workers sitting on a long wooden pool. The dough was presses into bronze plate as vermicelli, trennette, lasagnette, farfalle, pennette, conchiglie and other pasta forms, still known today.
The short forms were kept in drawers while the long forms were dried in the open.
The first mechanical devices for pasta manufacturing were invented in the 1800s. Around 1850, the first hand-operated pasta press was built. By 1860 more elaborated presses had been had been made. By increasing the popularity of pasta it required more efficient production process to be developed.
By early 1900s, mixers, kneaders, hydraulic piston type extrusion presses and drying cabinets were available for batch manufacturing of pasta.
Extruder was developed by Joseph Bramah, in England in 1797 before applied to pasta processing.
It required 18 to 20 hours to dry pasta when using a low temperature drying profile. High temperature drying (60 to 80 degree C) of pasta was introduced in 1974 and ultra high temperature (80 to 100 degree C) drying was introduced in the late 1980s.
Drying at high or ultrahigh temperatures has reduced drying time of long goods (e.g., spaghetti) to about 10 and 6 hours, respectively.
Today, pasta manufacturing is totally automated with pasta presses capable of producing spaghetti at 3,500 kg/h and macaroni at 8,000 kg/h.
History of Pasta Processing
