
Italy’s rarest pasta - hwayern
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20161014-the-secret-behind-italys-rarest-pasta
======
ff_
As a Sardinian this is the first time ever I hear of this pasta, and I'm truly
shocked of how it's made, it really sounds like lots of work.

Now I'm super curious about it, but the preparation in sheep broth and
pecorino is one of the best combinations to have with pasta IMHO, very
promising.

Btw if you've never been to Sardinia make sure you visit at least once in
life, you won't regret it :)

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ezequiel-garzon
As an aside, if you don't mind, how close is Sardo to Latin? Can you rather
easily read Latin texts (assuming you haven't studied Latin, and are
proficient in Sardo). Thanks!

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umanwizard
I've never heard of this language, is it specially known for being
particularly close to Latin or something? Why would you expect it to be any
more mutually intelligible with Latin than any other modern Latin dialect is?
(I mean French, Spanish, etc.)

~~~
mhb
From TFA: _Residents here still speak Sardo, the closest living form of
Latin._

~~~
umanwizard
Ah, I must have skimmed it too quickly to notice that. Thanks!

Anyway, I doubt it is close enough to Latin to be mutually intelligible, as
all modern Romance languages are derived from Vulgar Latin, which is known to
be very different form the written Classical Latin.

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beat
This makes me think strongly of Matthew B. Crawford's books ("The World Beyond
Your Head", "Shop Class as Soulcraft"). He focuses directly on difficult
techniques like this, things that require both intellectual focus and physical
technique to master - craftsmanship. He believes that this is the finest work
we can do. Pure intellectual abstraction doesn't exercise our minds fully, we
need to engage with the physical world and its complexities as well.

Think about it - this is so incredibly sensitive to the exact consistency of
the pasta dough, it must change by temperature, humidity, time of day,
barometric pressure... to make it work, she just has to _feel_ the pasta, to
know pasta in a way that can only be done with years of manual effort.

That's why they can't build a machine to do it. They can't control the
conditions well enough.

~~~
Shivetya
I fail to believe such a machine cannot be made. I do however believe it may
not be economical to do so. If it can be measured then why cannot it be
reproduced? None of the values you listed cannot be measured and accounted
for.

She has three listed ingredients, however I am curious how much perspiration
is in the final product, surely her hands impart something through the skin
contact.

Finally the drying process would have its own effect, after preparing it how
much of a difference is there between it and another pasta? What exactly do
they consider the differences? Is it purely texture, if so then just the
preparation of the final dish can affect what you will perceive

~~~
beat
You should read Crawford, then. Read Sidney Dekker's "Drift into Failure" as
well. Complexity is the problem. Complex, evolving, interacting conditions.
You can't just measure in a vacuum when you have many interacting variables.

What you're talking about is the result of the reductionist intellectual
tradition. And it's been fantastic at many things - it built our modern world.
But it _cannot_ solve every problem. Not everything humans do can be reduced
to simple measurement and process.

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gakada
Blocked in the UK. Can someone help us read our own website?

Edit: why is this at -3? You guys are assholes.

~~~
antirez
You downvoted since our machine learning algorithm predicted you were about to
call us assholes.

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chewxy
have they tried getting chinese la mien chefs to duplicate her work?

Also relevant:
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299605105_The_Compu...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299605105_The_Computational_Complexity_of_Chinese_and_Italian_Noodle_Making)

~~~
thechao
In the spirit of famous-English-chefs-unable-to-make-thin-noodles, here's
Gordon Ramsay unable to make la mian:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaeyFyQemDw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaeyFyQemDw)

~~~
Mithaldu
Do they always cut his shows such that it's impossible to tell what's going
on, or is that one just extra mutilated?

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davidw
If you've never had handmade pasta in Italy, you're missing out.

My mother in law makes ravioli by hand for special occasions:

* She mixes the flour, water and salt * That is then spread out into sheets with the help of a hand-cranked machine. * She then uses a cutting roller to cut those into the right shapes. * Then the filling (mix of greens) goes into each one by hand and it's closed up. * They get cooked. * At the end they get a healthy bunch of ragù (bolognese meat sauce, if you must) on them.

I feel guilty eating them, because it takes hours and hours to do all that,
and then it's _gone_ in a few minutes it seems like.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> I feel guilty eating them

If you want to honor her time you shouldn't waste a moment on guilt, you
should just let the taste of the pasta linger as long as you can, until it is
interrupted by something else besides guilt!

You can get back all of those moments she put in by savoring the dish. That's
the beauty of well made food: it will tell quite a story in your body if you
let it.

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eliot_stein
Hello! Author of the story here. Really appreciate all the interest and wanted
to jump in on a few questions in the thread.

Taste? It's delicious. The pasta is so thin that it really melts in your
mouth. I've tasted it many times now and think that the trick is to not put in
too much pecorino.

Sardo? As many Sardi on this thread have correctly pointed out, Sardo is a
separate language from Italian, as opposed to a dialect. Like Italian,
Romansch, and Spanish, it's rooted in Latin. There are many variations of it
and each region speaks a different version. Barbaricino (what they speak
around Nuoro) is considered the least Italian-ized version of it. There are
more than 500 words that are nearly identical to Latin (domus, janna, etc)
with more distant words (stemming from Sardinia's earliest indigenous
population) that often refer to geological formations or animals (giara,
marxani, nuraghe, etc).

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znpy
What I am about to say is no solution, but: I can't quite understand why don't
people don't begin by trying and make a basic YouTube video about this
subject.

Don't want the tradition to fade? Spread it as much as possible.

~~~
unwind
Sure.

Here's Jamie Oliver attempting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHGZLjJ1CAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHGZLjJ1CAk)
(this might be the video linked in the article, that one failed for me). It
doesn't seem very easy.

~~~
Tobold
It's great to see the pasta-making in action, but damn, that guy is annoying.

~~~
Splendor
Whether that's true or not I don't think your observation adds much to the
conversation.

~~~
erikrothoff
Wow, what I nice way to counter the micro aggression of the parent post. Well
done, I'll be stealing that.

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rjdevereux
Video of it being made
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuRLaO1G5A0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuRLaO1G5A0)

~~~
dsjoerg
Thanks for the video, really helps me understand the process.

However she's not folding it eight times. A commenter on the video mentions
that she's doing it wrong, strings are huge.

~~~
TheRealPomax
In that case have some
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKN9MajEVOQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKN9MajEVOQ)

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maxpolun
Sounds like a similar process to hand-pulled cotton candy, just with pasta
instead of sugar.

here's how to make that:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auRNHI2nkIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auRNHI2nkIU)

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gotofritz
A lot of embellishments in the article.

The pasta can be found at the San Francesco di Lula festival, which can be
comfortably reached by car. Only a few pilgrims may do it on foot, some
barefoot, as a form of devotion, but these days it's increasingly rarer

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microcolonel
>Last year, a team of engineers from Barilla pasta came to see if they could
reproduce her technique with a machine. They couldn’t.

You can tell that Eliot is a pessimist; because if they couldn't design a
mechanism to make this pasta on the first visit, it must be impossible!

Admittedly though, it does seem like a lot of work.

~~~
yoz-y
I find it quite annoying that many outlets (be it articles, TV documentaries
or tourist guides) always try to point out how something arcane can not be
reproduced by modern technology or that the "knowledge has been lost". But it
seems like people like the narrative.

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vinayan3
With all the talk of the loss of manufacturing jobs maybe they can instead
talk about making this pasta. It might get some people to start producing it
in the US.

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gondo
The name of the pasta in the article is: Su Filindeu

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namaemuta
Do you think the process could be automatized? from my naive perspective, that
doesn't seem a tremendously difficult task.

~~~
gpderetta
From the article:

"Last year, a team of engineers from Barilla pasta came to see if they could
reproduce her technique with a machine. They couldn’t"

~~~
crispyambulance
I expect it certainly can be automated, but there's an ROI to be considered.
If it was just a matter of new dies and some process tweaks using existing
machinery, it absolutely would be done and that's likely what the Barilla
people were trying for.

If new technology has to be developed to match the manual process, that's far
a riskier proposition just for the purpose of adding yet another box of pasta
in fancy grocery stores.

It probably makes far more sense, economically, for a small number of elite
chefs to learn and replicate the technique for their restaurants. I am sure
folks are trying.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> I expect it certainly can be automated

Why would you expect that? Many processes are resistant to automaton.

I would be surprised if it could be automated. The amount of nerves and
muscles in the hands is enormous, and many of the materials have no artificial
equivalents. Cameras don't even get you close because you need to see inside
the dough to make measurements. And quite a lot of the process isn't observed
at all, it's modeled in the chef's head and hands. Things like the ratio of
muscles around her fingers encode reactions to data coming in from nerves.
Very difficult to study let alone replicate. A process like hand pulled pasta
seems like the absolute worst case for automation.

~~~
crispyambulance
I'm not suggesting it would be easy, but there are many manufacturing
processes that routinely do things which are staggeringly difficult and
sensitive in all kinds of domains. It really is a matter of understanding the
process and compensating for the things a machine can't do in the same way as
a human.

I posit that the ROI for such an endeavor would be disappointing in that all
you will have is another type of fancy pasta. That would sort of take the
magic and cache out of the dish as well.

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scythe
If I wanted to replicate this, I'd try to get a machine to make the strands
and then lay them by hand. Laying pasta that thin in an accurate way with a
robotic arm requires amazing computer vision and such, but pulling dough in
exactly this certain way is machineworthy.

~~~
hexane360
I'd almost expect the opposite. According to the article, most of the
difficult comes from managing the consistency of the dough. Salt water and
water need to be added throughout the pulling process to prevent tearing. The
laying process could probably be achieved by a loom-like machine: thread the
string around knobs at the edge of the disc, and then cut around the outside.

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kolokolo
And all I can think of is stupid greentext about Pepe.

~~~
Walf
Well they probably do crack the tiniest bit of rare pepe on their rare pasta.
(Pepe is Italian for pepper.)

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FireBeyond
[deleted] I'm guilty of only reading half the article.

~~~
tw04
Read closer:

>Recently, she’s begun making su filindeu for three restaurants in the area –
and in the process, offering non-pilgrims a chance to taste it for the first
time.

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emodendroket
Bit out of the way for me in Massachusetts but looks delicious.

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longwave
Google cache to the rescue for UK users:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_Uzr_k0...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_Uzr_k0MegUJ:www.bbc.com/travel/story/20161014-the-
secret-behind-italys-rarest-pasta)

~~~
conjectures
Thanks. But more generally WTH? How does their policy make any sense?

For non uk people: """BBC Worldwide (International Site)

We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our
international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run
commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the
profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new
BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital
activities at www.bbcworldwide.com. """

~~~
fredley
The BBC is forbidden from undertaking any commercial activity within the UK in
their charter. While obviously quite integral to the way the BBC works and is
able to work, this is a weird side-effect of that restriction.

~~~
xg15
Reminds me of the situation in Germany, where private publishers and TV
networks managed to successfully shoot down some of the better ideas of how to
use public television. Result is that public television networks are forbidden
to produce in-depth articles accompanying their reports and may only expose
free internet access to their shows within tight limits. The compromises
reached seem more and more like "you may produce content using public money as
long as you make sure the content stays sufficiently sucky".

~~~
fredley
The BBC charter is being renewed soon, and there is certainly a faction within
Government that is trying to push the BBC in this direction.

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longwave
As this is a link to the BBC, I thought this might be talking about the
spaghetti tree incident of 1957: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-
tree_hoax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax)

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antouank
Didn't know there are BBC pages that you cannot see in the UK!
[http://i.imgur.com/rUaBZPy.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/rUaBZPy.jpg)

~~~
vilmosi
The international part of the BBC is funded by ads. The simplest solution to
not make British citizens pay for it is to block it. Apparently.

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ChoHag
[http://pastebin.com/AZ2kda1e](http://pastebin.com/AZ2kda1e)

Because the BBC can kiss my arse if it thinks anything it produces isn't mine.

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andy_ppp
I find it reprehensible that the article is blocked to UK users. BBC worldwide
wouldn't exist without license fee payers, yet they feel like they can block
content from us.

~~~
pjc50
A weird consequence of the BBC charter. The article has ads on it, so they're
obliged to adblock it for you. Apparently they gave up maintaining the
separate ad-free version:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/online/website_changes](http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/online/website_changes)

~~~
andy_ppp
I'll write in and complain about this for sure; I pay a tax to see and fund
the BBCs content and directly or indirectly that pays for BBC worldwide to
exist. It's like saying I funded a startup and they did well from that and set
up a subsidiary with the money and that subsidiary blocked me because of this.
It wouldn't be defensible.

~~~
vilmosi
I think there are laws that would prevent BBC worldwide being funded by tax
payers.

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andy_ppp
The license fee differs from a tax how? In who it is paid to?

~~~
vilmosi
Sorry, I should have said license fee payers, but that isn't as catchy.

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sua_3000
why is this in HN

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batbomb
Because it's the exact opposite of Soylent.

