About This Quiz
Whether it's long strands of spaghetti or luscious sheets of lasagna, pasta is a perennial favorite and dietary staple throughout the world. Test your noodle about how much you really know about, well, noodles.Durum wheat is used in making pasta. Soft red winter wheat is good for cakes and pastries, while hard red winter wheat is used for bread.
North Dakota grows two-thirds of the durum wheat produced in America.
You only need two ingredients to make pasta dough -- semolina flour, made from coarsely ground durum wheat, and water.
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The Chinese were eating pasta as long ago as 5,000 B.C.
According to a report by the National Pasta Association, 77 percent of Americans eat pasta weekly.
By a wide margin, Americans name spaghetti as their favorite pasta.
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Different pasta shapes work better in different recipes. String pastas work well with light sauces; tubes are better for thick, chunky sauces, and small pastas are good in soups.
Farfalle means butterfly in Italian. Americans call this pasta "bowties," but this neckwear wasn't around in 1500 when farfalle pasta was created.
Ditalini, a small, tubular pasta, is not filled. Ditalini means "little thimbles."
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A pound of dry pasta yields about 8 cups of cooked pasta.
Orecchiette, or "little ears," is often favored for pasta salads.
Children eat around 62 pounds of pasta each year. Spaghetti and macaroni are their favorites.
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Brooklyn, N.Y., was home to the first pasta factory in the United States. Antoine Zerega, a Frenchman, opened it in 1848.
Worldwide, manufacturers produce 600 different pasta shapes.
While serving as the United States' ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson sent crates of macaroni, along with a pasta-making machine, back to America.
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Marcus translates to "divine food" -- the Greeks believed pasta was a gift from the gods.
In March 2010, chefs from Buca di Beppo Italian Restaurant in Garden Grove, Calif., used an above-ground swimming pool to hold 13,780 pounds of spaghetti and 120 gallons of marinara sauce, earning recognition for the world's largest bowl of spaghetti.
"Al dente" literally means "to the tooth." In pasta-cooking terms, it means boil the pasta until it's chewy but still firm.
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National Pasta Month is celebrated in October, probably because World Pasta Day is Oct. 25.
After steadily rising for decades, pasta consumption dropped with the popularity of the Atkins Diet and other low-carbohydrate meal plans in the late 1990s.