Making Italian Food With Pasta If a non-Italian thinks of Italian food, two dishes come to mind: pasta and pizza. Making the dough for a pizza means some work, so the first meal that most people cook if they want to 'cook Italian', they attempt a pasta dish. In spite of the fact that there are thousands of Italian pasta (and pizza) recipes, most non-Italians do not cook a dish that an Italian would recognize as Italian. In the rest of this piece we will take a look at how to make these meals more authentic without having to move home to southern Europe. As this piece is about pasta dishes, we ought to start with the pasta itself. Assuming that you want to use dry pasta and boil it, you ought to only purchase pasta that is made from durum wheat semolina flour. If you want whole wheat durum semolina flour, that is all right too. Do not be satisfied with a pasta just because it has an Italian name. Check the ingredients. Once you have the pasta, inspect it. Feel it, even look at it under a magnifying glass. It ought to be course and rough. When it swells up this roughness will allow the pasta to pick up more sauce than 'smooth' pasta. Durum semolina flour is course, rough and dense which is why it is used. It is not being used because it is less expensive, so do not let anyone tell you that pasta manufactured from high quality bread flour is better. It most definitely is not. Pasta is best eaten al dente according to Italians, which means 'to the teeth' or a bit chewy. Pasta made from most flours other than durum will not attain that quality, because it goes straight from dry to soft or over-cooked. You can easily recognize this low quality if the pasta collapses or breaks up. When you have bought decent pasta, you have to cook it well. Pasta is starchy and will give off starch, exactly like rice, so it ought to be boiled in a large pan with lots of water. Add salt after the water boils, if you need to and then add the pasta. Purchasing the right pasta is only half the battle, unless you just want to pour some olive oil on it or eat it with a salad. Different pastas take various amounts of time to cook, but most cooks will have started the sauce long before cooking the pasta anyway. However, if the sauce is very thick and the pasta water is not very salty, you could use some of it to water the sauce down before serving. This blends the flavours rather well. The sauce is also of regional importance, but it contains tomatoes more frequently than not in the south and less so as you travel north, where it is cooler.
In the north a sauce to be served with pasta may contain more vegetables and oil than in the south or the pasta may be consumed in a salad. Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a variety of subjects, and is now concerned with Italian Pasta Flour. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at Gourmet Food and Good Health.