In Italy, researchers are developing long-life industrial fresh dough

A week after National Pasta Week, Italian researchers announce that they have found a way to revolutionize the storage time of fresh industrial pasta. A challenge because in Italy, we do not touch the sacrosanct recipe, water, flour, eggs, a pinch of salt. It has been regulated by law for over 50 years.

>> In Italy, the Nobel Prize in Physics suggests lowering the heat under the pasta pan and puts the country in turmoil

But these researchers dared to put their hands in the traditional pasta to improve its conservation time, which today is 30 to 90 days in the fridge. Their secret ingredient is probiotics, those good bacteria that keep bad bacteria from growing and are usually killed by heat treatment, heat, or chemical preservatives. And the researchers found a second trick: they modified the packaging by adding a new mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen under a plastic film that no longer lets in either humidity or oxygen. This produces fresh pasta without fungus or mold for 30 more days, i.e. a package of pasta that can be kept for up to four months in the fresh section.

A real revolution for the country which, with its 300 varieties of pasta, is the world pasta champion. We can say that the pasta is a symbol of it. “A quarter of the pasta eaten in the world is Italian and we export almost half of what we produceunderlines Lorenzo Bazzana, responsible for the economy of the agricultural organization Coldiretti, questioned on Rai. So the pasta represents the country all over the world”he confirms.

These discoveries are above all an effective solution against food waste, underline the Italian researchers. No more expired packages of spaghetti, tortellini, farfalle, fusilli, rigatoni and others whose price has still increased by 22% this year. Prolonging the preservation of fresh pasta is an asset not only for the economy, but also for the ecology, and without a doubt, for stomachs too, Italian or foreign.