what you should know

Is it pasta or is it rice? It's pasta. It's pasta that looks like rice. It's pasta that you can treat like rice. Or treat like pasta. (Or treat like barley, which is what "orzo" means in Italian.)

Made with semolina flour (like other dried pastas and couscous), orzo is the ultimate selfless ingredient, what we like to call a "canvas ingredient."

You can toss it into just about any soup to give it substance. It's also one of the best dried pastas to use in salads because it's a good companion for diced vegetables (but doesn't overwhelm them) and really soaks up a vinaigrette.

and another thing Orzo also takes well to being treated like a rice in pilafs and risottos. (See, it's selfless.)

swell and dull When cooked, orzo swells and dulls in color. But it keeps its shape and has a creamy, velvety texture that makes an excellent backdrop for just about anything.

orzo factoid In one of our favorite cookbooks, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden reports that in Egypt orzo is called "birds' tongues" pasta, because it looks like...nevermind.

what you need

In Christine Ingram's The Rice & Risotto Cookbook, you'll find plenty of good orzo-as-rice options.

A heavy, stainless All-Clad 2-quart saucepan is great for cooking grains because it keeps the heat even and steady. (We also like to use it as our everyday soup pot, when we're cooking for one or two people.)

Most colanders don't work for draining orzo, because the individual pieces clog the holes. We like rinsing and draining orzo (and, for that matter, rice) with a wire strainer.

what you do

This saffron orzo with shrimp (from Coconut & Lime) has enough vegetables to make it a full meal.

In hogwash's "road trip" pasta salad, goat cheese is melted into the finished dish to create a beautiful, silky dressing.

This simple dish of orzo with mozzarella and mint highlights the textures of the cheese and pasta.

Shrimp and feta are a classic Greek combination. The pine nuts add more Mediterranean nuttiness, and we're always in favor of more nuttiness.

Featured recipe: This gorgeous orzo and wild rice salad comes from food stylist Tami Hardeman's blog Running With Tweezers and is the featured recipe for this week's Root Source Challenge.