In the Pasta Kitchen

A Cook’s Companion

HOW TO COOK PASTA

Pasta needs a lot of water to cook properly and the water must be boiling vigorously so that each strand, each shape, is surrounded, totally enveloped in its cooking medium. That is why our pasta cooking instructions almost always begin with: “Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil.” We figure 6 quarts of water for 500 grams (about 1 pound, usually one package of imported Italian pasta) of any type of long, spaghettilike pasta; for smaller shapes, you could use 4 quarts, but go with 6 quarts as a rule and you won’t ever go wrong.

Salting is also a critical point. All the talk about lowering salt in the diet is directed at people who consume a lot of packaged food, fast food, and the like. If you’re eating a normal diet of freshly prepared food and you’re not suffering from extreme hypertension, there is no need to restrict salt. In any case, 2 to 3 tablespoons of salt (a small handful) in 6 quarts of water is not going to be harmful. Anything less than that and the pasta will lack flavor. We favor coarse sea salt, preferably from Sicily, for this.

Add the salt after the water has come to the boil. And then, when the water boils again, which it will do almost immediately, add the pasta.

Which pasta goes with which sauce? Which sauce goes with which pasta? Don’t get hung up on this. There are said to be five hundred to six hundred different pasta shapes in Italy alone. And, along with penne, spaghetti, fusilli, linguine, and so forth, many pasta manufacturers give their own names to shapes—Benedetto Cavalieri’s ruote pazze (crazy wheels), or Pastificio Faella’s Vesuvio, which looks like small turtles. In general, smooth sauces, like many tomato- or cream-based sauces, go best with long, skinny, spaghetti-type pasta, while roughly cut vegetable and meat sauces are better with short, chunky shapes such as penne rigate or tortiglione. Lasagna has its own shape, the flat rectangles that are layered in the dish, but pasta al forno is best made with short, twisted shapes, with lots of quirks in which to nestle the sauce.

Back to the pasta: If you’re using long pasta, work it into the water with a long-handled wooden spoon or fork to get all of it immersed in boiling water as quickly as possible. If it’s short pasta, simply stir it—not once but several times during the cooking process.

Cover the pot until the water returns to the boil, then remove the lid and let the pasta cook vigorously until done. Start timing from the moment the pasta water returns to a boil. Follow package directions for the cooking time, but start checking a couple of minutes before the projected finish. Extract a piece of pasta and either bite into it or cut it apart. Al dente pasta has a slight, pleasant resistance to the bite, and a thin white vein, a tiny dot, at the center, when it is ready.

Fresh pasta will be done in a matter of minutes. Our old housekeeper in Rome, who taught Nancy how to make pasta fresca by hand, used to say, “Basta dire un Ave Maria”—just long enough to say a Hail Mary. In truth it takes a little longer, but not more than a couple of minutes. (Most fresh pasta is done when it floats—the Italian word is galleggiante.)

Do not overcook the pasta. Have a colander ready in the sink. Remove the pasta and drain it the moment it is done, keeping in mind that it will continue to cook in the residual heat even after it has been drained. (In 1937, Americans were advised to cook spaghetti for twenty minutes, according to a recipe book published by the North Bennet Street settlement house in Boston’s Italian North End. How times have changed!)

If pasta is overcooked to a mushy stage, it is not only unpleasant to eat but the glycemic index actually goes up. If you are trying to keep a low glycemic profile, by all means have your pasta very much on the underdone side.

A useful tip: Italian cooks, when draining the pasta, sometimes set aside a cup or more of the pasta water to add to the sauce. The starches in the water help to thicken and amalgamate a sauce that isn’t quite coming together.

Several rules or reminders

Do not add a spoonful of oil to the water. It is unnecessary, it makes the pasta greasy, it will not keep the pasta strands from clumping together, and it makes the pot just that much more difficult to clean out.

Do not rinse the drained pasta under cold water. There is no need for a procedure that only chills the pasta to no good purpose. With just a few exceptions, hot pasta and hot sauce are prerequisites for a satisfying meal.

Do not oversauce the pasta. Less is more in the Italian lexicon. The point is to taste the noodles as much as the sauce, a balance between the two. Thus, there should not be more than a spoonful of sauce left in the bottom of the bowl when all the pasta has been consumed.

Here’s a Quick Rundown on Pasta Cooking

For about 1 pound (500 grams) of pasta, bring 6 quarts of water to a rolling boil. Add a big spoonful of salt and then the pasta. Use a long-handled wooden spoon to push the pasta down into the boiling water—this is especially important for long, skinny pasta. It must be entirely immersed in the boiling water. Cover the pot until the water returns to a boil, then uncover and start timing the pasta according to the package directions. Start testing at least 2 minutes before the recommended time. Have ready a warm serving bowl. When the pasta is al dente, drain and turn it into the bowl with whatever sauce you intend to use. Toss and serve immediately.

Almost all pasta must be served immediately, so in most cases plan to have the sauce ready before you add the pasta to the water and dress the pasta as soon as it’s drained. Have ready a warm serving bowl to receive the hot pasta. (One quick way to warm the bowl: Transfer a couple of ladles of boiling water from the pot to the bowl and let it rest and warm while the pasta is cooking.)

One other tip from Italian experts: When it’s appropriate, cook the pasta until it’s slightly underdone, drain it, and then finish it off in the sauce you’ve made. The pasta will absorb some of the flavors from the sauce and the result will be a beautifully integrated dish. This technique is called saltare in padella, or tossing the pasta right in the pan with the sauce.

Serve the pasta immediately and encourage all the hungry eaters gathered around the table to tuck right in as soon as the pasta is in their plates. Don’t wait for everyone to be served. Italians take pasta seriously: It’s an insult to the cook, they say, not to eat it while it’s hot.

Buon appetito! everyone says as they dig in their forks.

And buon appetito! we say to you too, wishing you the happiest of adventures cooking and eating this loveliest of all the products of la cucina Italiana.

A note about portion sizes: Italians count on 80 to 100 grams of dry pasta per person. We reckon a pound (roughly 500 grams) of pasta will serve 6 people comfortably, especially if pasta is served, as it is in Italy, as a first course. If you serve it as a main course, a pound will probably serve 4 or 5. Most of our recipes are written for “4 to 6 servings”—6 if pasta is served in the Italian fashion, as a primo, or “first course,” to be followed by a secondo that is often focused on protein, whether meat, fish, or beans. If pasta is served as it is often done in North America as a piatto unico, a “single course” (“pasta e basta” is what Italians say, “pasta and that’s it”), then count on 4 servings.

Italians tend to eat pasta with less sauce than many North Americans are used to. In Italy the point is the pasta, and the sauce is there to garnish it and make it more interesting. In North America, we sometimes unhappily feel, the sauce is the point: It fills the plate and the pasta simply serves as a carbohydrate extension, like a piece of bread. We, being natural-born Italophiles, prefer to eat our pasta the Italian way.

We are adamant, however, in following the Italian tradition of not ever, or hardly ever, serving pasta as an accompaniment to a main course, as if pasta were something like potatoes or boiled rice. Pasta is the queen of the table and as such deserves an honored place, all by itself, at the start of the meal. Pasta may not be followed by anything at all, but it should never need accompaniment beyond a most delicious sauce.

Dressing the pasta can be as simple as the aglio-olio-peperoncino here. Or even simpler, just a spritz of good olive oil and a sprinkle of cheese, or as in Sicily, olive oil and crisply fried homemade bread crumbs, or a handful of chopped fresh herbs and a spoonful of good butter. In Roman trattorie it’s guanciale, diced and fried in lard or olive oil, with a bit of chili pepper and a little onion, and the spaghetti finished right in the padella, the frying pan, to absorb the flavors. In Piemonte, fresh pasta might be dressed with just the juices from the Sunday roast—a good bet for Sunday night supper. And in Liguria they layer the pasta in a baking dish with the roast meat juices and a lot of grated cheese between the layers, making sure the topmost layer is meat juices and cheese, then pop the dish into a preheated oven until the top is nicely glazed. With pasta, nothing gets wasted. Ever.

PASTA FRESCA: MAKING YOUR OWN

So much has been written about the glories of the Bolognese sfogline, the white-capped ladies who briskly and competently turn out kilos and kilos of egg-rich pasta each morning for the lunch tables of that city’s bourgeoisie, that it’s a wonder anyone else would dare take up a matterello (rolling pin) and approach the spianatoia (pastry board) to roll out a paper-thin sheet of sunny golden pasta. In Bologna those gorgeous rounds, or sfoglie, are sliced into broad sheets for lasagna, thin noodles for tagliatelle and the like, or filled with dabs of delicious forced-meat or ricotta stuffings to make cappelletti, tortellini, agnolotti, and so on.

This means average home cooks in Bologna don’t have to know how to make fresh egg pasta at all, not if they can just pick up exquisite tagliatelle or tortellini down at the local pasta shop whenever they want. In North America, if you want really amazing fresh pasta, you mostly have to make it yourself. In a pinch, store-bought fresh lasagna sheets or cut noodles are okay, as long as you trust the pasta maker, but we would never buy any type of filled pasta, as the quality is so often just not there.

Making fresh pasta at home is a skill that does require practice. If you’ve never made it before, don’t expect to be a master right out of the gate. Start by making lasagna sheets, which are easiest of all, and learn to work with and understand the dough before you move on to ravioli. Home pasta makers in Italy grow up learning to make pasta from their mothers, their grandmothers, and their mothers-in-law, and have spent years practicing and mastering it. It won’t take you years if you’ve never done it, but it might take a few tries to get it right.

In addition to the egg-rich pastas of northern Italy, made with soft white flour, there are other Italian pasta traditions that are just as venerable and just as delicious. On the streets of Old Bari, down in Puglia, the pasta makers line up each morning, working right in the open air, rapidly and deftly turning out orecchiette, the little ear-shaped pasta typical of the region. Their flour-and-water dough (no eggs) is made from locally grown hard durum wheat. In the hills around Siena housewives roll out long, thin strings of pici, again flour-and-water (no eggs), but made this time with refined 00 flour, each string laboriously rolled by hand. In the Tuscan Mugello on the border with Emilia-Romagna, cooks turn out the local specialty, tortelli di patate, fat dumplings of pasta dough filled, surprisingly, with tasty mashed potatoes. Over in Liguria each pasta maker has a wooden stamp, called a corzetto or croxetto, carved with initials or symbols to stamp an identification mark on her very own pasta. And in the western part of Sicily cooks make busiate from locally grown tumminia wheat, a heritage grain, and wind the strands of pasta around knitting needles to give them their characteristic twist.

Wherever you go in Italy there are pasta stories to be heard and pasta dishes to be tried. This is Sara’s story:

I learned to make fresh pasta from our late, beloved Tuscan neighbor Mita Antolini, farmwife, gardener, chicken and pig raiser, and cook. When I first met Mita, I was just ten years old and she was maybe forty. She ran her farm and her family efficiently and frugally with a smile on her face but with a will that brooked no contradiction. She made two kinds of pasta: thin, flat tagliatelle or broad sheets of lasagna, both using the same recipe—fresh eggs laid by the hens in her cortile (farmyard), a little water, a splash of olive oil, and refined white flour.

I loved to linger in Mita’s kitchen. In the beginning it was for the fascinating smells that came out as well as for the attention she expressed long before I had begun to master the language. There was a lot of cheek pinching and a lot of hard candies doled out from a jar on the counter. It was a typical Tuscan farmhouse kitchen with a large fireplace in the center where everyone sheltered in cold weather, a long communal table capable of seating up to twenty, and an alcove with a two-burner gas ring and a cucina economica, a small wood-fired cookstove that everyone hated to use in the summer heat but that helped to warm up the drafty farmhouse in cold weather. Mita cooked on the fireplace, on the gas burner, on the woodstove, in the bake oven that was situated outside beneath the stairs that led to the front door, and in what had once been the family chapel but was now a sort of summer kitchen in which all mass meals, such as for the annual harvest dinner, were produced. But she made her pasta right there at the long table in the main room while people came and went, cats mewed for offerings, and her religious sister-in-law Beppa went down on her knees Sunday mornings to say mass with the pope, broadcast on television live from the Vatican.

To make her pasta, Mita piled flour onto a wooden board laid across the big table, made a well in the center into which she cracked her orange-yolked eggs, added a half cup or so of water, and then kneaded it all quickly into a soft mass that she finished off with a tablespoon or two of extra-virgin olive oil pressed into the outside. She wrapped the dough tightly and let it rest for at least fifteen minutes, then rolled it out. When I was first watching, in awe, she used a long, thin wooden rolling pin, but later she acquired a small home pasta machine, the kind most Italian home cooks still use today. She made a fine, supple, and delicate dough suitable for ravioli as well as for cut shapes like tagliatelle.

Once I had mastered Mita’s recipe and her technique, I used it exclusively for many years in every restaurant and home kitchen I worked in. Along with most cooks, whether Italian or American, I believed that fresh egg pasta was a northern Italian technique, made exclusively with soft white flour. And I also believed that the durum wheat used in the Italian south was suitable only for eggless, water-based doughs that made tougher, harder, thicker shapes such as orecchiette and handmade fusilli. They were more rustic, I thought, than the refined egg pastas of central and northern Italy.

But in the summer of 2014, while traipsing through a hot, dusty flour mill in Puglia, where hard durum wheat was milled for many of the finest artisanal pasta producers in the country, the fragrant nutty aroma of the wheat awakened memories of the wheat harvests of my Tuscan childhood, and I remembered a Tuscan chef who had told me she always mixed durum wheat into her egg pasta to add flavor and strength to the typical 00 flour.

That summer, Stefania Peduzzi of the Rustichella d’Abruzzo pasta-making family showed me how to make classic Abruzzese pasta alla chitarra, mixing eggs and just a splash of water into durum flour (called in Italian semolina or semola rimacinato) before pressing the dough on the guitar-shaped chitarra to be cut into long strings. If Stefania used durum flour with eggs, I decided, so could I.

It’s true that refined white 00 flour makes a soft, delicate pasta dough, suitable for the most tender ravioli, tagliatelle, and delicate sheets for Tuscan lasagna. But as I experimented with the durum wheat flour I discovered that it added not just flavor but structure and strength as well, bringing a pleasing texture to fresh pasta as well as a good deal of flavor. When you make a wet filling like that for the eggplant and ricotta ravioli here, you want that added strength.

I was also amazed at what a difference a lot of eggs can make to the structure of the dough, especially when I made tajarin (Piemontese dialect for tagliolini) to go with white truffles (see here). What I had thought of as excessive began to make sense. For a frugal Tuscan housewife, pasta dough evolved to use a minimum number of eggs, which, even with chickens in the courtyard, were a precious commodity. But in Piemonte, if you’re already eating expensive and rare white truffles, who cares about being reticent with the eggs?

The fat and protein in egg yolks give a springy, tensile strength to pasta dough, making it actually much easier to work with. Mita’s dough always has to be dusted with lots of semolina and it does not really last. Ravioli made with Mita’s dough must be eaten right away, whereas the tajarin, with all its eggs, is still good three or four days later. And the egg-rich dough of the north needs only a light dusting of flour; in fact, with its springy texture, it is a much more successful dough for tricky filled pastas such as agnolotti del plin from Piemonte and the famous tortellini of Bologna. The recipe for agnolotti that we’ve included is fairly simple (see here), but traditional tortellini are much more complex. This is, however, intended to be a collection of recipes that are for the most part simple and easily executed. Even I, who pride myself on my pasta-making skills, am daunted by the idea of constructing intricately filled pastas without the help of my professional kitchen to back me up.

To make fresh egg pasta, traditional in parts of northern Italy, mound 3 to 5 cups of flour on a board, the quantity depending on how many are being served, and make a deep well in the center. Crack 3 to 5 eggs, one by one, in the center. Then, using a fork, break the yolks and beat the eggs, slowly drawing in flour from the walls of the well; be careful not to let the eggs break through. After the dough has come together, knead it for 5 minutes or so, kneading olive oil into the outside. Form into a ball and set aside, well covered, to rest for at least 30 minutes before rolling out.

SARA’S NOTES ON MAKING AND ROLLING OUT PASTA

One of the cornerstones of successful pasta making is to use as little added flour as necessary. Too much flour toughens the dough. With that in mind, I like to use a large board or wooden countertop for making the dough and for rolling it out.

I mound the flour on the board and form a deep well in the center, cracking eggs and adding water to the well. Using a fork, I break the yolks and beat the eggs right in the well, slowly drawing in flour from the inner walls of the well to mix with the liquid in the center, being careful not to let the eggy liquid break through the flour wall and deluge the board. (Note that many cooks prefer to mound the flour and start mixing the eggs in a large mixing bowl to prevent the eggs from leaking out and making a mess.) When the dough is formed and it’s no longer possible to mix with a fork, but it’s still too sticky and wet to use my hands, I use a baker’s bench scraper, scraping and turning over, constantly adding a bit more of the flour on the board. At the end I use my hands to knead the dough smooth for five minutes or so, depending on the recipe. Finally, I knead a couple of tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil into the outside of the mass of dough, then wrap the dough tightly with plastic wrap and set it aside to rest for at least thirty minutes, overnight if refrigerated.

When I’m ready to roll out the dough, I dust the board down with flour and cut off a portion of dough about the size of a lemon, leaving the rest wrapped until I’m ready to use it. I dust the working portion heavily with flour and begin rolling it out on the widest opening of the pasta machine. I roll the whole thing through, dust it with flour again, and fold it lengthwise into thirds, working to form an even shape. Then I roll it through on the widest setting once more. I do this at least three times in order to get a very even, supple shape, but also to work in more flour. If the dough is very wet or relaxed, I continue to fold and flour a few more turns. Then, when I’m satisfied with the texture, I begin rolling the dough out for real, rolling and dusting lightly with flour after each roll-through, reducing the size of the opening every couple of times. How thin I make it depends on what I’m going to make. If I plan to cut tagliatelle or tagliolini or make pasta alla chitarra, I take it down to two or three notches on the pasta machine before the end. But if I’m making ravioli or another filled pasta, I want it to be as thin as possible, so I take it down to the narrowest opening, being careful to dust lightly with flour and handle the dough carefully and gently with my hands.

When I’m cutting ravioli or another filled pasta, I scatter a bed of semolina or fine cornmeal on a sheet pan or tray for the finished shapes to rest on; it prevents the filled pastas from sticking and, unlike all-purpose flour, will fall off in the pasta cooking water. If I’m cutting noodles, I toss them frequently in flour, durum or regular flour, depending on what I used to make the pasta. I curl them into nests and let them dry a little on a cookie rack or grid, tossing them occasionally so they don’t slump and clump together.