Do you think Su Filindeu tastes much different from any other pasta prepared with sheep broth and pecorino? It seems like it should, given the huge amount of work going into it, but since the ingredients are so simple, it also seems like it shouldn't make a huge difference...

Absolutely.

I'm not in Italy but in China. 'Lamian' or literally 'pulled noodles' are a staple dish for my own and colleagues lunches on most days. Staples in North China are largely wheat or corn based.

Dough is usually pre-kneaded to the consistency the chef prefers. 'Cut' is then done by pulling, doubling-up, re-pulling, etc, until reaching the right thickness that the stand desires.

The article mentions su filindeu as being thin and stretched, with drying into a web-like layered structure. This is certainly going to be interesting and a bit different.

But this process of pulling and cutting varies chef-by-chef. Arguments break out a lunch between colleagues who prefer 'thin' noodles vs 'regular' vs 'think'. Going to a single place and ordering a preference just doesn't work. 'thin' where a chef makes the dough thick may be thin in diameter, but not in mouth texture. 'thick' (or wide and thick) in a restaurant that provides regular or thinly kneaded dough just doesn't feel satisfyingly chewy in a restaurant that doesn't routinely serve a thicker dough - not enough chew.

And then there's the flour used.

The difference that technique brings is huge. Liken it to bread: flour with a consistent level of ¬14-15g of protein (similar to flour used for pasta, though usually different type) per 100g can result in remarkably different breads depending on kneading, resting, forming, and remarkably more techniques.

Out of curiosity, are you using ¬ to represent "approximately" in place of the ~ (tilde) symbol? The only place I've ever encountered the ¬ symbol is in formal logic, where it represents [not].

Typo.

US keyboard in UK mode, pressing the key marked ~ resulted in ¬.

I love lamian. It's hard to find in the US (especially here in Minnesota) but there's one Szechuan place near that does a really nice dish with that type of noodles in chili vinegar sauce with crushed peanuts.

I was curious and went to look up lamian on Wikipedia. Found a link on the page for chow mein, which I followed out of curiosity. It was fascinating to see the way Minnesota chow mein was singled out as particularly bad. Unfortunately in my experience it's absolutely true. That was my introduction to Chinese food as a kid, so sometimes I'll have a little for nostalgia, but in the end it disappoints. I think if I had some that was well prepared I would be in heaven, as in the movie Ratatouille.

You can see here how difficult it is to make.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaeyFyQemDw

Basically, Ramsay (not really a slouch at cooking) is trying to make lamain and he's getting a huge bitching out by the existing chef who tell him it's going to take him ten years to get good at it.

I think this video is a good counterpoint to when Ramsay is outclassed, knows it, and is respectful.

I'm in MN too. What is the restaurant called?

I'd guess Little Szechuan[1]. Note that the original University Ave location in St Paul is now hot pot only.

1: http://littleszechuan.com

Actually, the Tea House nearby. I _think_ it's lamian. At least it has that super chewy texture. I have no idea if they're fresh made or not, though. Still, about as good as you're going to get in the area, I think.

Where, please. Really good Chinese in MN is hard to find.

There are a few good places in the Twin Cities area. The ones my wife (from Taiwan) and I really like are Little Szechuan, The Tea House Restaurant, Evergreen (but don't order the American Chinese food, obviously), Grand Szechuan (great veg dumplings made in house), and the cafe in United Noodles.

I love Evergreen's three cup tofu and eggplant enough that I figured out how to make it at home now that I don't live three blocks away :-P

You're forgetting another way to process the noodles. Knife cut (刀削). That gives a completely different mouth feel and form factor.

That's my favorite kind of noodle, and it's hard to find in the states in general, as it takes a long time to get good at it and you generally don't batch make the noodles.

I didn't taste it yet, but texture and preparation affect a lot the taste of pasta, in general.

Also, this is made with semolina flour, which is different (and much better IMHO) from the flour used to make pasta usually (in Italy and in the rest of the world).

I wouldn't call semolina unusual at all. De Cecco [1], probably the best of the bigger Italian brands, makes all their pasta products with 100% semolina (pasta di semola di grano duro). Bigger, cheaper brands such as Barilla use either the lower-grade durum flour or a mix of semolina and flour.

(For those confused with the terminology: Both come from durum wheat, but semolina is milled more coarsely from the bran, whereas durum flour is everything else, milled to a finer flour.

[1] http://www.dececco.it/us_us/

You're very right, and thanks for the detailed clarification!

I got confused with the terminology, apparently my brain doesn't work well when trying to speak three languages at the same time :)

Durum wheat is used to make both pasta and semolina.

Based on the description of preparation, the texture would be the defining difference, not the taste.

Texture defines taste.

https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/20...

According to your citation, texture and taste and aroma are separate characteristics with some overlap that combine to define flavor. The defining component difference in Su Filindeu would be texture, enhancing the flavor.

That's awesome thanks. Its always been intuitive for me that texture would affect how air mixes with food in the mouth and would also affect flavour distribution of sauces in the mouth but its good to see someone put actual study into it

As an aside, if you don't mind, how close is Sardo to Latin? Can you rather easily read Latin texts (assuming you haven't studied Latin, and are proficient in Sardo). Thanks!

I speak Sardo, and I studied Latin for 5 years at High School, and I was very bad at it.

So I would say that "modern" Sardo (defining the "old" as the first written texts some centuries ago) it's close enough to Latin to see where every word comes from, but definitely too far to give you understanding.

I can understand Spanish though :) (context: we've been in the Spanish Kingdom for like 400 years, and the language have been influenced a lot, many shared words.)

How close is it to Romansh, the old raetic/latin language still spoken in Grisons, Switzerland? Could you understand them?

Given that I've never been in Grisons, but I heard it only from YT, I would say that it's not very close with Sardo.

I can understand them though, but mostly because I know Italian. (Romansh also sounds to me somewhat Portuguese and Slavic at the same time, it's a very cool language).

Neat, thanks!

I do not speak Sardo, as I speak another Sardinian language, but I guess I know enough to comment. Sardo spelling is probably closer to Latin than most other romance languages and some sentences are surprisingly close to their Latin equivalent.

I would say that it still lack many Latin features (for example cases, neutral gender), and sentence construction is generally different enough that native speaker wouldn't have a significant advantage to other romance language speakers.

> Can you rather easily read Latin texts (assuming you haven't studied Latin, and are proficient in Sardo).

I guess the statement about "closeness" comes from the study (Pei, Mario 1949) referenced in the Wikipedia page about Sardinian language that somehow developed a metric and tested several languages against their parent one. Apparently Sardo has the lowest distance from Latin among Romance languages.

On a more practical side, I speak Sardo and studied Latin in high school. I cannot easily read Latin texts without a dictionary at hand and a little grammar review. I guess their similarity arises when you compare the written languages but most of us experience Sardo as a spoken-only language and many find it difficult to follow in written form. On the contrary we experience Latin as a written only language. Who knows, probably it would be a lot easier for us to understand spoken Latin.

This raises a good point. Even when languages are "close" it usually doesn't mean "mutually intelligible" unless they are really close. I grew up in the US but I have Italian parents who came over somewhat recently in immigration terms - the 1970's. My first language is/was Standard Italian, as my grandmother really pushed my parents not to teach me their dialects. My mom is from Genova and my father from a small town in Abruzzo called Alfedena - since you are Italian, you probably know, very different dialects. Zeneize is considered its own language. Anyhow, to my point, Standard Italian is extremely close to the spoken dialects in my family, probably closer than Sardo to Latin, but I still have trouble understanding either side of the family in dialect. Part of that, of course, is that I was raised outside of Italy, but not entirely as I don't have trouble with the Florentine dialect since I speak pretty close to what they do.

And don't get me started on written versus spoken! Then again, my dad's dialect might look like Welsh if anyone thought to write it down. But on my mom's side, Zeneize does have a sort-of official written form, and if I read carefully I sometimes have an idea of what's going on :)

My girlfriend is Sardinian and speaks Sardo. She's said to me in the past that it's fairly close to Latin, certainly closer than other languages (French/Spanish for example), but Sardo is generally a mix of Latin, Italian, with a few Spanish words.

Also worth noting there are different dialects of Sardo (such as Logudorese, in the north, if I remember the name correctly). And some dialects are closer to Latin than others.

In Italy/Sardinia dialects can be so far apart from one another that it's difficult to understand one another.

Some of the dialects are so far apart that they are actual languages distinct from Italian. If you search in the ISO list of languages[0] you can find neapolitan, sardinian as distinct languages different from italian.

[0]http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php

Sardinian (Sardo) is a separate language, not a dialect of Italian. Road signs (town/city names) in Sardinia are often in both Sardo and Italian. You can think of it like the difference between Welsh/English.

> You can think of it like the difference between Welsh/English.

I don't think that's quite right: Welsh is a Gaelic language and English is Germanic, so they're from different families, while Sardinian & Italian are much more closely related.

Possibly more like Scots language(not Scottish Gaelic) and English

http://www.ayecan.com/read_scots/burns_museum.html

> Though his position in society wis ower laich for him tae hae the richt tae vote, Robert wis nanetheless passionate aboot politics and made his writin desk his ballot box. Scunnerin the weel-daein and pooerfu, hooanever could prove a fykie business.

> Robert Burns loved the lassies. He fell in love aften an wi ease, and wi mony weemun frae a wheen o backgrunds. The wey he treatit his lovers wis different ilka time, and ilka relationship affected Robert in its ain weys.

Sardinian and Italian are much much closer than Welsh and English. Speaking Italian, I can make out written Sardo kinda sorta ok, and I'm not a native Italian speaker. As an English speaker, I can't make heads or tales of Welsh.

Italy has only been a united country for about 150 years, so it hasn't been that long since Italian (as we know it today) is widely spoken. Previously, people tended to speak their local Romance language. See the intro and history sections of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_language has some information.

Beyond that, it frankly just "looks" a bit more latin, with s's at the end of words for plurals, and more u's than Italian has.

I think it also has fewer loan words, and has staid in some cases closer to older Latin words: 'domu' for house rather than 'casa'.

Sardo is about as close to Latin as Italian, Castilian, and Catalan.

BTW Sardo is actually not one language, but a set of languages spoken in the island.

I've never heard of this language, is it specially known for being particularly close to Latin or something? Why would you expect it to be any more mutually intelligible with Latin than any other modern Latin dialect is? (I mean French, Spanish, etc.)

From TFA: Residents here still speak Sardo, the closest living form of Latin.

Ah, I must have skimmed it too quickly to notice that. Thanks!

Anyway, I doubt it is close enough to Latin to be mutually intelligible, as all modern Romance languages are derived from Vulgar Latin, which is known to be very different form the written Classical Latin.

There are lots of languages you've probably never heard of :). I realized the same when I started to read about the family of Romance languages to learn what the concept was all about. Not being an expert, it does seem to me to be a theme that languages of relatively isolated communities tend to me significantly more conservative in their evolution than in more cosmopolitan communities.

I'm heading there next summer for a couple of weeks. Could you recommend some must do places to see, things to do? Would be really interested to hear from your perspective.

Gotta have that Sard worm-cheese

How is Sardinia different to mainland Italy?