Before You Begin

Equipment, Ingredients, Some Basic Recipes, and Techniques

Useful and/or Necessary Equipment

An 8-quart pot for cooking pasta—large enough to hold 6 quarts of water plus the pasta; ours are made of stainless steel with a removable insert, making it easy to drain the finished pasta without losing the pasta water.

Several long-handled wooden spoons: A kitchen can never have too many wooden spoons, and long-handled ones are essential for stirring pasta into the cooking water.

A big stainless steel colander for draining.

A large serving bowl for dressing and serving pasta.

A box grater or Microplane for cheese—actually both are useful, since the box grater gives you a choice between fine and coarse grating.

An immersion blender for mixing sauces: We prefer this to either a food processor or a regular blender because it’s easier to control the texture of the sauce. Most immersion blenders will not produce a perfectly smooth sauce, but most pasta sauces should not be perfectly smooth anyway.

For making fresh pasta

A pasta rolling board, called a spianatoia in Italian: This is not as easy to find as it ought to be; in fact you may have to ask a local craftsperson to make it for you. It should be large, at least 28 inches in one direction—although 36 inches is better—less so in the other (but make sure it will fit your countertop); it should be reversible, with a lip at either end that hangs over the edge of the counter and keeps the board from sliding away as you work; and it should be smooth so that, even if it’s made of two pieces of wood, the division between them is almost undetectable.

A rolling pin (matterello): A proper rolling pin for pasta is thinner than a normal pastry rolling pin, no more than 1½ inches in diameter, and the same dimension continuously throughout. About two feet long is ideal.

Hand-cranked pasta machine—we prefer the Atlas for its sturdiness. Imperia is another brand that is also widely used. We do not recommend the kind of electric machine that both mixes the dough and extrudes the pasta. It makes a very industrial-feeling product.

Some things that aren’t necessary but will make your life a little easier

A wheeled pasta cutter for ease in cutting and trimming.

A salt box next to the stove: So much easier to reach into the salt box for that handful of sale grosso, coarse salt, you need for the pasta water.

A Japanese mandoline, about a third of the price of a stainless steel French mandoline and the perfect tool for thinly slicing onions, carrots, indeed just about anything to go into a pasta sauce.

A large, heavy-duty mortar with accompanying pestle: This is really hard to find and costs a small fortune if you do find it, but you will never regret having it. We were fortunate to be able to buy a heavy marble mortar in a Ligurian hardware store some years ago, and even though it was a chore and a half to get it back home, we are grateful that we did so every time we use it. It crushes everything from basil leaves to fennel seeds to black peppercorns. We cannot live without it.

SOME BASIC RECIPES

STOCKS AND BROTHS

What’s the difference between stock and broth? Not much, it turns out, and most people use the terms interchangeably. If you want to get pedantic, the Culinary Institute of America defines stock as made with bones, which give it a gelatinous content, while broth is made with meat, which makes it richer. (Which leads to the question of what is bone broth? We will leave that to future historians of twenty-first-century American food fads to figure out.) Most of the time we make stock with meat and bones so, we hope, our stock is rich and our broth is gelatinous and it’s all very good.

Italian cooks, especially in the north, often serve deeply flavorful broths with pasta, especially little filled pastas such as tortellini, but they don’t use a lot of elaborate stocks, fonds de cuisine in French terminology, as the basis for sauces. In Italian kitchens, most sauces are built in the pan, the flavor generated from what cooks in the pot. Many Italian recipes call for the addition of un dado, meaning a bouillon cube, but this is one area where we turn our backs and reject out of hand modern Italian traditions. To us, canned stocks and stocks made from bouillon cubes all too often taste of yeast extracts, hydrolized soy proteins, and the tin of the can that contains them. In most Italian recipes, if you don’t have stock, we recommend using plain water rather than a commercial product, no matter how organic it claims to be.

That said, it is often important to have a good chicken stock available—and chicken stock is a great rainy Sunday project. Once the stock is done, it can be frozen in pint containers, giving you a ready source whenever needed. Vegetable stocks are another useful substitute for preparing vegetarian pastas and risottos, while fish stocks or broths are important in many seafood dishes.