Pasta and Noodles

Pasta is a paste of flour and water (or eggs) mixed into a dense, cohesive mass — the structural opposite of bread. Where bread is an aerated foam held together by elastic gluten, pasta is a solid, continuous matrix where gluten provides cohesion and chewiness without any need for gas-trapping elasticity. This difference explains why durum wheat — strong but inelastic — is the ideal pasta grain, while bread wheat’s springy gluten would fight every attempt at shaping.