Margheritine
Daisy-shaped.
Name. Little daisies. Margherita is the Italian word for daisy.
What it is
Margheritine are a tiny dried pasta for soup. Each piece is shaped like a small flower petal or a little daisy. Factories extrude semolina and water dough through a bronze die and dry it slowly. Pastificio Di Martino makes a Gragnano IGP version that cooks in 9 minutes. The playful shape is often used to introduce children to pasta.
No source ties the shape to one region. It belongs to the pastina group, the small shapes cooked in broth. Di Martino suggests it in warm winter broths and with early spring vegetables. It also works risotto-style or tossed with courgettes or cherry tomatoes. Divella sells it as shape number 60.
How to cook margheritine
9 minutes in boiling salted water. Take the shorter time for al dente, the longer time for fully cooked.
9:00
Start when the water returns to the boil.
Water and salt
- Pasta, dry
- 400 g
- Water
- 4 L
- Salt
- 40 g
100 g per person as a main. A litre and 10 g of salt per 100 g. Adjust with the portion calculator.
The steps
- Bring 4 L of water to a full boil in a tall pot. Add 40 g of salt when it boils.
- Add the margheritine. Stir for the first minute so nothing sticks. Start the timer when the water returns to the boil.
- Or cook it in the broth it will be served in, and do not drain it.
- Bite a piece at 8 minutes. A hairline of white at the centre is al dente.
- Scoop out a cup of the cooking water. Drain, or lift the pasta straight into the pan.
- Toss with the sauce over the heat for a minute. Add cooking water a splash at a time until it clings.
Read more: what al dente means and why the pasta water matters. Times for every shape are on the cook page.
What it is served with
Pairs with: In brodo · Minestrone
By brand: numbers, cook times, spec sheets
1 brand, 1 product page.
| Brand | Product | Cook |
|---|---|---|
| Pastificio Di Martino | Margheritine | 9 min |
Nutrition
Per 100 g of dry semolina pasta. The shape does not change these numbers. The dough does, so a whole wheat or egg version of this shape reads differently. See every dough.
| Per 100 g | Energy | Protein | Carbohydrate | Fibre | Fat | Sodium | Iron |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dry | 371 kcal | 13.0 g | 74.7 g | 3.2 g | 1.5 g | 6 mg | 3.3 mg |
| Cooked | 158 kcal | 5.8 g | 30.9 g | 1.8 g | 0.9 g | 1 mg | 1.3 mg |
One portion. 100 g dry becomes about 235 g cooked, 371 kcal and 13 g of protein. Pasta takes on 2.3 times its weight in the pot.
No margheritine? Use these
Ranked by how they behave with sauce, not how they look.
Sources
- Margheritine, Pastificio Di Martino (cook time, from the brand's own product page)
- Pastificio Di Martino: Margheritine (profile: origin, form, use)
- Wikipedia: List of pasta (profile: origin, form, use)
- Cook time: Pastificio Di Martino Margheritine: 9 min.
- USDA FoodData Central (nutrition per 100 g, by dough: FDC 169736, Pasta, dry, enriched; FDC 169737, Pasta, cooked, enriched, without added salt), public domain. The cooked yield is derived from the two energy figures.
- Margerthine, Wikipedia (names, origin), CC BY-SA 4.0
- Dimensions: brand spec sheets and measured boxes. Blank fields are unmeasured, never guessed.