Pasta is an unleavened dough of milled wheat and water, shaped into hundreds of forms and boiled until tender. In its classic Italian dried form it is made from durum-wheat semolina and water alone — amber-yellow, hard and glassy in the box, swelling as it cooks into pale, smooth strands and shapes with a firm, springy bite. Fresh pasta, by contrast, is usually softer wheat flour worked with egg, rolled thin and cooked within days. Plain cooked pasta is mild and faintly sweet, with a clean wheaty, lightly nutty smell; its real job is texture and a starchy canvas that grips and carries sauce, which is why the shape and the precise al dente bite matter as much as anything on the plate.