Orzo

Orzo is a tiny pasta shaped like a plump grain of rice, and its name is a small puzzle: orzo is the Italian word for "barley," the grain it resembles, yet in Italy this pasta is more often called risoni, "large rice," after a different grain it resembles just as well. It belongs to the family of pastina, the "little pastas" made for soups and children's meals, and it is machine-made and relatively modern rather than an ancient hand-shaped form. Though Italian, orzo travels widely: Greece knows it as kritharaki ("little barley") and builds the baked dish giouvetsi around it, and it turns up across the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. What unites its uses everywhere is that orzo behaves less like a noodle than like a grain, a stand-in for rice you can boil, bake, or simmer.

A small, dense, rice-grain form, usually a centimeter or two long and slightly flattened, extruded from durum semolina. Unlike a strand or a tube, orzo has no sauce-holding architecture to speak of — no ridge, no crevice, no hollow — its whole design is to read and eat like a grain of rice. That density is a feature: it keeps its shape and firm bite in a soup or a salad far better than a thin strand would.

Orzo's job is to be a pasta that plays the part of rice. It gives body to soups (Italian minestrone, Greek avgolemono, wedding soup), it makes a firm and forgiving base for cold summer salads, and it cooks risotto-style into a creamy orzotto when you want the comfort of risotto in half the time. Because there is no surface to grip a sauce, orzo is dressed the way a grain is: coated, folded, and absorbed into a dish rather than sauced on a plate.

1. 01In minestraStirred into minestrone or a light broth for body.
2. 02AvgolemonoSuspended in the Greek egg-and-lemon soup.
3. 03Insalata di risoniCold summer salad with vegetables, herbs, and feta or mozzarella.
4. 04OrzottoCooked risotto-style: toasted, then simmered with stock.