You Have to See How This Beautiful Pasta Is Made

For the last few years, the folks over at Barilla have held a tasty competition where they see who can come up with the most innovative pasta design. As you might know, how a noodle or pasta shape is made can affect how it tastes, feels in your mouth, and holds onto sauce. Italian grandmas would be ecstatic if they only knew their handmade craft has been turned into something so, so cool. Want to see how it works?

The video above is for the 2015 pasta competition, but this year’s entries have already been turned in and are being judged as we speak. This year Barilla received 1,300 proposals for different pasta shapes for their 3D printer. Just imagine being the person who gets to test them out! Last year’s winner was this Lune, a sphere-shaped pasta with “craters” — or holes — for sauce to come out.

In order to make the different pasta shapes, you load semolina dough into a 3D printer, which is the size of a small fridge. The printer makes the pasta layer by layer, and it takes roughly three minutes to make nine pieces of pasta. Not bad!

We can’t wait for the results to see what this year holds. The idea of extruding pasta in this manner means shapes we never thought possible are now in existence. Can you just imagine biting into a pasta ball with sauce inside of it? The possibilities are literally endless.

If you could make any shape pasta you wanted and had the ability to make all your noodle dreams come true, what shape would you make? Would you sauce it in a pan after cooking or bread and deep-fry it? Would your shape allow you to inject a filling in it that caramelizes as it cooks? Share your thoughts below!