What is a bronze die?
The first phase of making egg pasta is the creation of the dough, the mass, the combination of ingredients used. In our case durum wheat semolina, wheat flour and fresh eggs.
Once you have the dough it must be rolled out. Our grandmothers and those who roll the dough out at home usually do this on wooden surface with a rolling pin. The pasta factories, be they artisan or not, use instead a tool which gives shape to the pasta and is called the extruder. What happens is that the dough is pushed against the die ending where it is forced through the shaped dies that are located on its surface, and which have the chosen shape for the pasta to be produced. In our case the egg pasta sheet, but the same applies to hard wheat pasta: spaghetti, penne, fusilli and so on.
Why use a bronze die?
The bronze die is a traditional part of processing the dough, but this alone does not justify its use. Metal in fact costs more than other materials (e.g. Teflon) and requires a longer processing time. But the qualitative benefits that the use of bronze dies gives to the pasta are huge. Coming into contact with bronze, small abrasions appear on the surface of the dough resulting in a particular porosity, which helps the pasta to absorb sauces and dressings in an exceptional way. Something which is impossible to achieve with Teflon dies.
Moreover, working with bronze dies implies using high-quality durum wheat and very long drying procedures. And this means not affecting the organoleptic and nutritional properties of the raw materials used: minerals and vitamins, and also flavors and fragrances will be on your table as they originally were, at the beginning of the process.
