Durum Wheat

Durum, also called pasta wheat or macaroni wheat, is Triticum durum, a tetraploid wheat species with four sets of chromosomes, unlike common bread wheat, which has six sets; it is the second most cultivated wheat species worldwide, though it accounts for only about five to eight percent of global wheat production. Its name comes from the Latin word for hard, and it is the hardest of all wheats in terms of resistance to milling, which paradoxically produces a dough with weak, or soft, properties compared to hexaploid bread wheats. Commercially produced dried pasta is made almost exclusively from durum semolina, the granular product of its milled endosperm, and durum also supplies couscous in North Africa, dishes such as tabbouleh and kibbeh in the Levant, and flatbreads across the Middle East; its yellow endosperm gives pasta its characteristic color, and it yields more extractable wet gluten, about twenty seven percent, than common wheat's twenty four percent.