Cheap VS Expensive Pasta: Is there a Real Difference?

CHEAP VS EXPENSIVE PASTA: IS THERE A REAL DIFFERENCE?

What is the difference between cheap and expensive pasta? What to look for when buying pasta?

On the store shelves, you’ll usually have industrial/commercial pasta VS artisan pasta going head-to-head. Because pasta is a staple in any Italian food pyramid, quality is important to us.

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The biggest difference that is going to show the quality is the color. Industrial pasta comes in the “oh too familiar” shade of brown or darkened yellow and it’s very smooth. Artisan pasta is white with the slightest tint of yellow and rough to the touch. Artisan pasta makers purposefully add roughness/edges to their pasta while industrial brands smooth theirs out with Teflon/plastic.

Is expensive Italian pasta healthier?

How long the pasta dries and the temperature during the duration of that time makes all the difference in how healthy it is for you. If you watch our videos, you’ll know that Italians are the master of timing their foods to achieve the perfect taste and nutrient composition. Whether its removing Margherita pizza out of the oven at the perfect second or leaving Porchetta to cook for 8 hours, timing is crucial to every part of the process.

Artisan Italian pasta is no different. Gianluigi Peduzzi has an extensive process that takes 30-50+ hours to dry. Most industrial pasta is dried merely 3-4 hours at a staggering 185 degrees F (85 C). Because artisan pastas are slow dried, they are much easier for our bodies to digest. In addition, as pasta is a carbohydrate, the high temperatures that cheap pasta brands are heated to caramelizes the sugar, darkening the pasta. Pasta heavily reacts to this, decreasing the nutritional value and making it considerably harder on the digestive system. Artisan pasta and its slow drying process allows it to keep a similar shade to that of the semolina used. The sugar is not destroyed resulting in the integrity and characteristics of the grain being kept.

Does cheap or artisan pasta taste better?

Because artisan pasta like Rustichella D’Abruzzo is dried 10% more in comparison to it’s cheap rivals, these pastas expand more when cooked. It just about doubles in size! Along with this, artisan pastas actually absorb the sauce instead of simply being coated in it. Artisan pastas embody whatever rich flavors they are cooked with.

When you go to compare them yourself, a large pot, lots of boiling water, and 2 grams of salt per liter is all that you need. Skip the oil per the experts.

Once on your plate, it’s almost impossible to not notice how the commercial brand is lifeless. Its dull appearance and way it just lays with the sauce is not impressive. You need to see it for yourself – watch it here. There is no flavor from the pasta. All the flavor comes from the sauce and the pasta is present in texture alone. They’re not connected and almost working against each other with each bite.

Artisan pasta is truly alive! It will double in size and the sauce is absorbed and connected to it. This infusion of pasta and sauce is an incredible sensation. Each can individually be savored and enjoyed yet they are fused together at the same time.  It’s a unique and incredible taste experience.

Cheap VS Expensive Pasta

When it comes to comparing cheap name brand pastas to the artisan pastas, while they come at a higher price, we cannot say enough how it is worth its price. Go for the artisan pasta, your belly (and digestive system!) will thank you, and it’s sure to bring a smile to your face and remind you that pasta can very much be a regular staple in your diet too!

I love pasta….that might be the least surprising sentence I’ve ever said.

What I love most about pasta is its versatility and how there are dozens of different sauces, vegetables, proteins, etc. that you can serve with it, and I love all of the different shapes it comes in.

While I would love to tell you that I make fresh pasta from scratch all the time…I don’t. I’m sorry to disappoint. I do believe that dried pasta is just as good as fresh. It’s convenient, has a long shelf life, easy to cook, and is a great thing to whip up for a quick dinner after a long day of school and/or work.

However, with so many different brands of pasta out there, it can seem a bit daunting to tell which one delivers the most consistent results with the amount of cooking time they recommend, so I have decided to give myself the task of trying these different brands side by side to not only see and taste the difference but also see which one is the best.

I have selected 7 different pasta brands that can be found in my local grocery store in my Colorado town: American Beauty, Barilla, Bionaturae, De Cecco, Dreamfields, Kroger, and Private Selection. I also picked up Ronzoni, a gluten-free pasta brand, just to see if gluten-free pasta is any better or worse than normal, more on that later.

To keep with consistency, for each brand I have selected a pasta that is well-known and beloved by all, spaghetti. I can’t think of many more Italian pasta shapes that have received more love. I will also be using 1 weighed ounce of pasta per brand because…hey, I love pasta but I don’t love it that much.

I know there are some brands labeled as Thick Spaghetti or Thin Spaghetti, but I chose any brand that just said Spaghetti.

For each pasta, I’ll be boiling them individually in a pot of salted boiling water, following the cooking time on each box/package, by that I mean setting a timer as soon as the raw pasta goes into the water and starting said timer as soon as the water comes back up to a boil. Most of the brands promised a 10-minute cook time, but there are a few variants that I’ll talk about when I get to them.

Once the time is up, I then drain the pasta but reserve the water in a separate pot, I figured this would cut down time on waiting for the water for the next batch to boil, and then I rinsed each pasta with cold water to stop the cooking process.

I will be comparing them based on price per package, cook time, any visual differences, and the texture when cooked. I won’t necessarily be going off of taste because…hey, it’s plain pasta, I think we know what that’s going to taste like, but if I do notice a difference then I’ll be sure to write that down.

I’ll also be doing a bit of a durability test by pulling on the cooked pasta and seeing how easily it snaps, this is an important thing to note especially if you’re planning on serving the pasta with heartier sauces like a ragu or bolognese.

Without further ado, let’s meet our brands.

The first pasta I’ll be looking at is the gluten-free pasta brand from Ronzoni.

Established in , Ronzoni strives with sharing their passion for pasta while also keeping the belief that quality ingredients is the start for eating well, claiming that ‘Ronzoni Pasta brings friends and family together to the table; the story that unfolds from there is up to you’

For this experiment, I decided to try out their gluten-free pasta, made with brown rice, white rice, corn, and quinoa to see how it matches up to the wheat-infused pasta out there. I decided to cook this one first because I didn’t want the…gluten-ness of the other pasta brands to interfere with its beauty.

For only $2.99 per box, it sits in the middle as far as price goes, although I did notice that it only has 12 ounces of pasta per box while most of the others have a pound. It’s also worth noticing that their spaghetti is a bit thinner than some of the other brands, we shall see how that comes into play during the tasting.

Moving onto the first of the regular pasta varieties that I’ll be tasting, up first is one of the most popular pasta brands in the US, American Beauty Macaroni Company.

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Beginning their story in when the Kansas Macaroni Company merged with the Denver Macaroni Company, American Beauty took it’s official name later in , previously being called AMERICAN BEAUTY, and as mentioned is one of the leading brands of pasta in America.

Being one of the cheaper brands of pasta, only $1.59 per bag of spaghetti, it can be no guess as to how American Beauty became as popular as it is. While the spaghetti was uniform in shape and size, I did notice a few white patches along some of the strands, perhaps this is bits of hardened flour meant to keep the pasta from sticking together while cooking, I will see how that plays out in a moment.

Moving away from the comfort of my American home, we now hit up one of the leading pasta brands in the world, Barilla. Established in , Barilla Pasta shares their love for pasta in over 100 countries and is a world leader in pasta and ready-to-use sauce. With that kind of recognition, I can only have high expectations for Barilla.

For only $2.19 for a box of spaghetti, it is worth noting an even thickness and shape among Barilla’s spaghetti strands and around the same cook time as many of the other brands, so this may have to come down to whether or not the texture of the cooked pasta outranks any of the other brands.

Almost halfway there, we now look at a company that provides organic pasta for consumers to enjoy, Bionaturae. A relatively new company in the pasta world, only about 25 years old, Bionaturae prides itself by providing organic pasta made with organic flour and ingredients, claiming that it represents the heart and soul of Italian cooking.

With that being said, Bionaturae happened to be the most expensive brand I found, with a box of spaghetti costing $3.49 vs $1.59 for American Beauty. I suppose I will be finding out if that price really does make this pasta worth buying.

While the shape and thickness of the spaghetti strands were consistent, I did notice that their pasta was slightly thicker than some of the other brands, even though all of the boxes only say spaghetti and not ‘thick spaghetti’, so that might be interesting to taste.

Up next, another very popular pasta brand that is currently being seen in restuarants across America, De Cecco. Since , De Cecco prides themselves on bringing authentic Italian pasta to the dinner tables of the world. They keep to the ancient tradition of pasta making with a slow-drying process and keeping the ingredients as simple as possible.

Sitting in the middle with a few of the other brands with the price of only $2.99 per box, it’s worth noting that the De Cecco pasta was a bit lighter in color than the other brands, this could have to do with the type of wheat they used, or perhaps they used whole eggs vs egg yolks, I can’t say for sure.

It’ll be interesting to see if that lightness comes through in terms of taste.

Up next, we have a pasta brand that takes pride in being a healthier alternative to some of the other pasta brands out there, Dreamfields. Dreamfields claims that their pasta is a bit healthier than some of the other brands on the market as theirs is made with a golden wheat grown in the Great Plains of North Dakota and that each serving of their pasta has 5 grams of fiber while the majority of brands only have 2 grams.

I will see whether or not that extra fiber affects the taste of the pasta in a bit, for now, it is worth noting that, while Dreamfields spaghetti costs the same as De Cecco and Ronzoni, each box only has 13.25 ounces of pasta, interesting but notable detail as far as getting your money’s worth goes.

Dreamfields’ pasta is also a bit thinner than some of the other brands, but it seems to make up for the fact with a 9-minute cook time vs the 10 minutes of most of the other brands.

Now switching to a more generic brand, we now hit up a grocery brand that has been taking the nation by storm, Kroger. With stores such as City Market, Fred Meyer, and many other stores throughout the US, it seems that Kroger brand products is here to stay, so we might as well see how it stacks up with the Italian pasta brands.

It might not be a surprise that the Kroger spaghetti was the cheapest pasta brand I found, with only $1.25 per box, but cheap does not necessarily mean a bad thing, at least in my opinion. It was also one of the few brands with a 9-minute recommended cook time, so we shall see if that does lead for a better result.

Finally, we have another generic grocery term that is associated with Kroger but is a term that fares favorably with national brands, Private Selection.

My thought there is to compare the generic Kroger brand with Private Selection and see if one really is better than the other. In fact, it was that train of thought that lead me to doing this experiment.

The interesting part for me was that the Private Selection spaghetti has the longest cook time of all of the pasta brands I’ll be tasting, recommending 12-14 minutes vs 10-12 minutes for most brands. It also had a lighter color like with the De Cecco, but whether or not that affects the flavor and texture, I will soon find out.

Ok, time to make a decision.

First off, the gluten-free one was quite good, I think I would recommend it to anyone who has a gluten intolerance or simply wants to go on a gluten-free diet.

As for the regular brands, the Dreamerfield is immediately out for me, that sour flavor was off-putting. I’m also taking out any brands I found had little resistance strength, as that would not bode well to hearty sauces like I like, so that takes care of Bionaturae and Private Selection.

I will note that some of the American Beauty strands split down the middle, so I think I have to take that one out too.

That leaves the final 3: De Cecco, Barilla, and Kroger. Comparatively, the Kroger pasta didn’t have the same resistance strength as the other two, so I’m afraid it’s out.

Now, we have the top 2: Barilla and De Cecco. Both very solid in terms of texture and resistance strength. While Barilla is a solid choice, it is a bit thinner than De Cecco and, honestly, doesn’t have quite as much natural flavor.

So, by a process determined by me, the best supermarket pasta brand is….DE CECCO!!!!!

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