Much of this is overengineered. My entire wife's family is from Sicily, and I lived there for 5 years. The important step is to add the pasta to the sauce skillet after the pasta is al dente, and cook it for another minute or so while turning it. This is called "mantecare" in Italian. If you want, you can add a few lines of oil after you turn off the fire ("al crudo" i.e. "raw"). I have never seen anyone do the other steps.
The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
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Re: The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
#42It seems to be pasta day today on HN. So I heartily recommend Spaghetti all’Assassina - eschew the boiling step altogether and cook the pasta directly in the pan with the sauce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_all'assassina
I have made this and a non-stick pan is essential. Otherwise, you have a very annoying mess to clean. The relevant Cook’s Illustrated/ATK recipe: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/article...
Unfortunately the materials coating the non-stick pans are well-established carcinogens. Cast iron stuff is a good alternative and needs only a bit more care.
Re: The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
#43Much of this is overengineered. My entire wife's family is from Sicily, and I lived there for 5 years. The important step is to add the pasta to the sauce skillet after the pasta is al dente, and cook it for another minute or so while turning it. This is called "mantecare" in Italian. If you want, you can add a few lines of oil after you turn off the fire ("al crudo" i.e. "raw"). I have never seen anyone do the other…
Adding pasta water to thicken the sauce and tossing so that the water and oil forms an emulsification is important unless you want oily, watery pasta. The only step I see worth skipping is adding more fat, that one makes no sense and just suggests there wasn't enough fat used when making the sauce in the first place. I guess ultimately it really depends on the sauce that is being prepared.
Re: The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
#44I like good food, so I’ve started to follow recipes on sites like this one. However the thing that no one talks about is that cooking “properly” takes a huge amount of time cumulatively for a single person or even a small nuclear family. A blogger will talk about a quick little dish. First of all it is going to take you longer because you haven’t spent the last decade chopping onions. Second, even as written this “qu…
Cooking every meal from scratch is a recipe for disaster.
Despite what this blogger tells you, reheated, next day pasta is still delicious, so you are allowed to cook more than one serving per person.
My go to pasta takes maybe 45m to cook, and it results in 4-5 servings, which is two meals for two people:
1Kg of tomatoes, that you blanch beforehand (pour boiling water over the tomatoes after you score their skins in a cross, leave to sit). Peal the tomatoes and dice them into as small chunks as you want.
In a wide pan (even a wok), fry some bacon cubes (or pancetta if you want to be authentic) in oil or butter, whichever. When they have reached a level of crispiness you're OK with, dump the cubed tomatoes in and cover with a lid. (If you're feeling fancy, you can take the bacon out and add at the end, I rarely do)
Put a pack of pasta to boil - I usually use 500g of fusilli (don't buy Barilla, those guys are assholes), and as the guy says, make sure the water is very salty, but not bitterly so.
In small bowl crush 5-6 cloves of garlic. Pour about a spoonfull of oil and stir with some rough salt until it becomes a little like mayo in consistency. Dump another spoonfull of sour cream and homogenize.
Take the lid of the pan and use a potato masher to crush the tomato cubes into a nice sauce. It does not need to be perfect, but make an effort.
By this time, the pasta should be close to done. When that happens strain the pasta (keep some water if you want). Dump the garlic cream in the sauce, homogenize (maybe with the water) and then add the pasta. (The longer the garlic cooks, the less impact it will have on the overall flavour, my preference is full garlic)
Stir vigorously until pasta is well covered in sauce then take off the stove.
Dump a bunch of grated hard cheese on it (I use about 250g of Grana Padano, or in dire straight some sharp Cheddar) and stir until it coats everything evenly. Ta-da, you have pasta!
PS. Apologies to any nonne that I offended with my interpretation of authentic pasta.
Re: The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
#45This is awesome! A question for Italians in the audience though: is using butter as a fat something that’s commonly done? Being Portuguese and fond of Mediterranean cuisine, I always saw butter as a fat as being a more American thing but maybe that’s just the wrong perception and it’s totally fine if you use a dab of butter? PS: I do it myself, reason being that usually I’ll use extra virgin olive oil while preparing…
> I always saw butter as a fat as being a more American thing
French cuisine famously uses tons of butter. Depends _which_ French cuisine of course, the Mediterranean south tends to favour olive oil, but holds true for the stereotypical idea of French food
Re: The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
#46ps. make sure you get bronze-nozzle extruded pasta, not teflon extruded .. [ if you get dried pasta ] It creates a nice rough micro-texture on the pasta surface when extruded, which helps it cook easier, and hold more sauce. Swear, not making this up ..
Tbh I’m still skeptical about the difference in sauce holding, but bronze die pasta are usual higher quality and worth it if only for that
Re: The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
#47This is almost a religious matter among my Italian colleagues and I see a few blasphemies on this video already. The recipe I was taught on the hills of Tuscany 30 year ago is so perfect and simple I'll never prepare pasta in a different way. * First slice garlic and put it a pot together with excellent quality olive oil * Fry it until garlic becomes slightly yellow but nor brown, and in the meantime in a separate po…
Cooking the garlic from the start makes it lose all its flavour, unless you use a tonne. Using tomato sauce is a very small convenience (maybe 40minutes worth, which mostly is waiting) vs making the sauce from scratch from fresh tomatoes.
The main issue with making sauce from scratch is getting rid of the skins, and in order to do that you can blanch the tomatoes: get 1Kg of fresh tomatoes, score them in a cross from side to side and place them in a pot (stem down), pour boiling water on them until they're fully covered. Wait until the water cools down, then peal the tomatoes and dice them in cubes. Place the cubes in a pan and cook with a lid for about 10-15m, then crush them with a potato masher. You now have tasty tomato sauce from scratch.
Re: The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
#48I like good food, so I’ve started to follow recipes on sites like this one. However the thing that no one talks about is that cooking “properly” takes a huge amount of time cumulatively for a single person or even a small nuclear family. A blogger will talk about a quick little dish. First of all it is going to take you longer because you haven’t spent the last decade chopping onions. Second, even as written this “qu…
If it takes you 10 minutes to clean up after cooking a 15 minute meal you must be cooking like the Swedish chef from the muppets.
Re: The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
#49As an italian who is told he's pretty good at cooking, some of this is on point but a few things sound "wrong" to me (I use quotes because there's really no objective way to do this literally right or wrong, I'm just comparing with my experience / what I perceive "we learn from grandmas"): - Put the pasta into the pan with the sauce (which I guess is the main point of the article which starts off with "italian" resta…
No offense intended, but all of your suggestions sound very stereotypically Italian, which is to say they put an enormous emphasis on the traditional ways that pasta and sauces are made in various places in Italy. There's nothing wrong with this, celebrate tradition and heritage all you want, but that's very different to what Kenji goes for in general and what Serious Eats goes for in general. Their goal is usually t…
None taken!
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to contribute though, since I was not attempting to celebrate anything nor to emphasize on traditions. I was just saying those "goals" have well known solutions that differs for some good reasons with what is described in the article, which claims (by its title) to explain "the right way" on basis that are unclear to me.
I do not know "Serious Eats" nor the author, so I'm sorry if I am antagonizing (not my intent, but I get it might be seen this way) a celebrity or his fans and in this upsetting people. I'm just contributing things I know from experience, whereas arguments like "this is one way, end of story" seems brittle to me, because you are basically dismissing the points that I probably didn't even explain decently (on your examples: you add pasta water, you get starch in the sauce which helps thickening things but you dilute other ingredients and will need to cook for more time to have the liquids evaporate thereby overcooking the pasta; you add "fats" like butter or oil at the end and you change the flavour of the dish significantly, other than its nutritions). Then again, if that's what you are looking for, great, I think I said at the beginning there's no objectively right or wrong, it's food we are talking about, if you are happy with eating the outcome good for you.
I mean, by all means please try it, and with that I mean actually get in the kitchen and do it, I think you'll realise there's a lot more than just "using a technique that makes sense in theory, end of story" to get your goals.
Re: The right way to sauce pasta (2016)
#50I like good food, so I’ve started to follow recipes on sites like this one. However the thing that no one talks about is that cooking “properly” takes a huge amount of time cumulatively for a single person or even a small nuclear family. A blogger will talk about a quick little dish. First of all it is going to take you longer because you haven’t spent the last decade chopping onions. Second, even as written this “qu…
You get faster/more organised at doing the preparing steps for cooking with practice, and if you clean as you go it can be quite efficient.
You don’t need chef level knife skills, but you can become competent quickly enough and with good sharp knives it’s not hard.
The one thing I will say though is a lot of the time estimates in recipes are absolute bollocks - my biggest annoyance is when it comes to caramelising onions. “Oh ten minutes” the food blogger says. lol no. That’s a muuuuuuch longer job!