So how's a girl to choose the very best way? If you're this girl, you obsess. You make batch after batch—dozens and dozens of batches, in fact—to find out. You walk around dusted and streaked with flour, crumbly bits of dough crusted to the end of your sleeves. You make spreadsheets and charts, and sometimes you maybe even cry. You make all-egg pastas, pastas made with just whites, just yolks, and nothing more than water. You try different flours and check resting times at fifteen minute intervals for almost an entire day. You taste more ratios of egg yolk to egg white to flour than you care to admit. You add oil, you add salt, you add oil and salt. You wave forkfuls of fettuccine at your friends and family and colleagues, wrangling them into taste test after taste test. You read every book you can get your hands on. Your forearms get totally ripped.
Eventually, you realize there's no such thing as THE perfect pasta.
It's not just a layman's issue, either. When I was in culinary school, I had a series of instructors who only left me more disoriented. Some insisted on oil, others on salt, still others on additional yolks or a splash of water. Prescribed kneading and resting times often contradicted each other. One instructor told us to hang the pasta to dry for at least 10 minutes before cooking it; others had us keep it tightly wrapped until the moment it was dropped in the pot.