a question about pasta for all the cooks out there.
do any of you find any consistent differences between any of the commercial brands of pasta. I have been told I should buy the premium brands but I really can't taste any real differences between them and the store/generic brands. What about making your own pasta? Does it really taste better? Is it worth the effort?
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Last first: dry vs fresh
They are two different products. Dry has a coarser, more grainy texture where the fresh is silky smooth. Generally, dry is made from semolina, water and, maybe, salt. Fresh, generally, is made from semolina, eggs and water. Often it is made from softer flour, softer giving a silkier texture. Fresh made without eggs, and dry made with eggs are also possible, but far less common.
Don't confuse silky with mushy. Both can and should be cooked al dente.
They taste similar, but not the same.
So why two and when are they used? Again speaking broadly, they are interchangeable. That said, some gravies and sauces go far better with one and not so well at all with the other. A heavy ragu is far better on dry that fresh, for example. A pesto sauce on fresh is very nice. There is a whole sensibility on this aspect of pasta,a nd books have been written about it.
Williams Sonoma has a book on pasta that is actually very good and deals with both types.
Now about "premium" vs store brand pastas.
I find there is a difference and I prefer what some might call "premium" brands. But before we go further, please note there is also a super premium grade - at least if cost is an indicator.
At the low end, we have store brand pasta. All is acceptable, but not as reliable. They seem to me easier to overcook and often wind up with a lot of broken pieces after cooking. It has to do with the underlying quality of the raw ingredients - mainly the semolina.
What I think most people consider "premium" pasta are the well known brands. Barilla, DeCecco, Ronzoni, Prince, San Georgio, etc. I may be a pasta snob, but I think only the first three are clearly better than store brands. Barilla is the most forgiving in staying al dente when cooking. DeCecco has better shapes and textures. I think that comes from using heated bronze dies when the macaroni is formed. The resulting pasta has a sort of "toothed" texture that holds sauce better. Ronzoni seems to be the best balance of taste and texture, although the taste is less than Barilla and the texture less than DeCecco.
Ronzoni is an American brand and always has been.
Barilla is an Italian brand ("The Best Selling Pasta in Italy"
but is now meade here of all American ingredients.
DeCecco is all Italian.
By the way, Safeway now markets a brand of their own pasta that is imported from Italy and costs more than the other three!
The Super Premium pastas are a whole new game. They're "artisinal" and "small batch" and "hand crafted".
What they really are, in my view, is grossly overpriced. If one of the three top brands I cited above is $1.25 a pound, on sale, there is no way on the goddess's green Earth any "artisinal" pasta is worth $6 a pound. It simply is not. Period. Hard stop.
There is one special category with only one brand. Dreamfields. If you are watching carbs, take a look at this stuff. It is double the price of the top brands but yields only 5 net grams of carbs (compared to 36 to 38 for regular pasta). It tastes nearly indistinguishable from the top brands, but is a slightly more prone to overcooking. For diabetics or others with carb issues, it is pretty amazing stuff.
At Casa di Stinky, we use Barilla and DeCecco, but favor Barilla. Maybe once every month or two we make fresh.
And then there is the whole group of "healthy" pastas. Whole grain, whole wheat, this, that, and the other. We use that, too, but the taste and texture are waaaaaay down there in a lot of applications, but just fine in others. You have to experiment to see what your family's pallet favors.
My brother's first wife was one in a line of Sicilian cooks. The men and women in her family routinely made dishes from scratch. They were locavores before locavores were a trend.
Picture the volcano from "Close Encounters". That was the flour start on a big table top. Eggs beaten and dropped in the middle. All kneaded, kneaded, kneaded. Then rolled out into strips.
A quick boil made for a great pasta, with whatever else was going on. 
It isn't a rocket science project. The store brands are cheaper and I defy anyone to distinguish a store brand from an identically shaped expensive brand.
As for "fresh" pasta, that's a different story. If it is made fresh and sold from the place that makes it, then it will definitely be superior. No major brand does that.
Making your own is good, but the consistency is completely different. At first it seems like you're eating playdough, but that's only because what we mostly eat has no texture. The flavor will always be superior. I highly recommend it.
Getting back to brands - fuck the names. Go with price per quantity and if it's the same, buy the store brand just to support them. The same is true with cereals. Oat rings are fucking oat rings, dammit! Oatmeal is oatmeal. I don't need cartoon characters to make me feel better about being up too early. 
