Shine on, you crazy helix

[shewhomust]

Watching any pasta shape being extruded, be that through a small domestic machine or a vast industrial one, is hypnotic. Short shapes are particularly mesmerising, because the dough - made from durum wheat flour and water - emerges at speed from the bronze or Teflon-coated die, and is then chopped to size by a rotating blade. And then there are fusilli, whose helix form is created by an ingenious die that was invented and perfected in the early 1900s. Fusilli twist their way into being, the Syd Barrett of pasta shapes, emerging from the die in a psychedelic spiral.

Rachel Roddy, Guardian Feast, 30.03.2024