Skip to main content
Main

Macaroni and Vermicelli

A simple pasta made by kneading wheat flour, salt, and water into thin dough, cutting into strips, drying, and boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Macaroni and Vermicelli

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Knead the wheat flour with water and salt until smooth.

  2. Press the dough into a thin layer.

  3. Cut the dough into narrow strips like noodles.

  4. Dry the strips before cooking.

Cook and serve

  1. To cook, boil the dried noodles in water until tender.

  2. Serve with a sauce made from shoyu and bonito extract.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Wheat flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and chew.
Water
Hydrates the flour so its proteins can bond into a smooth, elastic dough.

The step that matters

Kneading the dough until smooth. Kneading aligns and develops gluten strands, which give the noodles elasticity and keep them from tearing or falling apart when cut and boiled. Too little kneading leaves a crumbly dough.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Wheat GruelWheat Gruel6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes