Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It (11 page)

It’s important to know, though, that dried pasta is not an inferior choice to fresh pasta, like cheese spread you squirt from a can versus fresh cheese. The Italians have been making dried pasta for hundreds of years, and it tastes divine.

Homemade vs. Store-Bought

You know I love to make things from scratch. If I can get my hands into the food, I’m enjoying it before it even hits my mouth. I make my sauces from scratch. Joe makes our sausage from scratch. We even make our own wine. (We don’t normally stomp the grapes with our feet and dress like characters from
I Love Lucy
, but this year, me and Jacqueline just had to give it a try. It was too fun.)

Of course, I also know how to make pasta from scratch. Once you know how to do it, you can have fresh pasta ready for cooking in fifteen minutes. But I usually don’t, and here’s why. The unused pasta doesn’t last as long as dried. It creates a whole bunch of extra dishes for me to wash. (And believe me, I’ve got enough dishes and clothes to wash for the next fifty years. My girls, they gotta change their outfits like three times a day. Drives me crazy!) But the most important reason I don’t regularly make my own pasta is because the stuff you can buy in the store is so inexpensive and so good, it’s not really worth the extra effort. The difference between homemade sauce and the stuff in a jar? Life-changing! The difference between rolling out your own pasta and the beautiful bags imported from Italy for two dollars? You can’t tell.

When I do make my own, though, it’s usually for dishes that use big shapes of pasta, like lasagna, manicotti, or ravioli. You roll them out, cut them, and shape them pretty easily. But the small pastas like fusili or farfalle, those I use dried.

Brand Name vs. Generic

In most cases, I choose the products imported from Italy that I know are well made and not full of additives. But for pasta, you can actually go with a local brand, as long as it’s a good one.

Mine and Joe’s favorite Italian dried pasta brand is De Cecco. It’s been made in Abruzzo by the De Cecco family for 120 years. People used to have to dry pasta in the sun until Don Filippo De Cecco invented a drying machine for those rare cloudy days. Their factory was bombed by the Germans in World War Two, but they were able to rebuild because after all the Allied soldiers fell in love with pasta, international demand for their product grew. I also like that they still use a bronze die, and I love their logo: a gorgeous, curvy Abruzzo country girl carrying wheat.

The other dried pasta we usually buy because it tastes fantastic is Via Roma. It sounds all Italian, but it’s actually an American brand made by the A&P grocery store. Their packaging is adorable: a black-and-white picture of an elderly couple enjoying a meal. It may be a generic brand, but since A&P gave it a private label and put some thought and skill behind it, it tastes amazing.

I’ve had friends tell me that the cheapest dried pasta on the shelves doesn’t cook up very good. My advice: spend twenty cents more and get a guaranteed winner.

Designer Pasta

Like everything, there are “designer” brands of pasta, called “artisanal pastas,” that make smaller batches of better quality and of course charge a bit more for it. But unlike shoes or cars, a box of premium pasta will cost you about seven dollars, rather than two. My favorite is Latini Classica Red Box selection by Carlo and Carla Latini. The Latini family has been farming wheat in Osimo, Italy, since 1888, and they really have perfected it with what they say on their own Web site is “genius and love.” They use bronze dies, and their pasta, even in a blind taste test, totally wins, even without any sauce at all. If I’m having fancy visitors I really want to impress, I send Joe down to the Italian market for some Latini. I’m not the only one either, since most of the best Italian restaurants in New York use Latini as well (and you thought they made it all by hand . . . I told you, it’s a pain in the ass!).

Specialty Pasta

I said all pasta, fresh or dried, starts out pretty much the same way, as a soft dough. This is true. However, some companies get a little creative and add extra ingredients to their dough. You might see green pasta that has spinach in it. Tricolor pasta. Red pepper or purple beet pasta. In Venice black pasta stained with squid ink is popular!

Colored and flavored pastas are fine, if you like the taste of them; just check the ingredients and make sure the manufacturer didn’t add any unwanted extras in there, too. Christmas tree pasta shapes are fun for the holidays, as long as they aren’t green only because of an unnatural dye. Look out for added sugar and things like corn syrup, as well.

Whole-Wheat Pasta

The biggest question I get about pasta these days is if I use whole-wheat pasta or not. The answer is: Joe and I tried it, and to be honest, it tasted more like the box it came in than the pasta we were used to.

That was a few years ago, and I hear that the whole-wheat pastas are getting tastier, but I’m still gonna pass on this one. When you make pasta with a whole-wheat flour instead of the hard durum flour, you’re changing the consistency the Italians perfected for years and years. I don’t need pasta that goes all mushy or won’t hold on to the sauce for me.

Pasta is supposed to be an almost silent partner in the dish. It’s the vehicle that carries all the rich, fresh ingredients into your mouth. I can’t have a pasta with its own strong flavor competing with my perfect toppings.

I did a little research—and by that I mean, I looked at two boxes in the grocery store side-by-side—and I discovered something shocking: all that whole-grain, it’s-so-much-healthier-for-you, you’ve-got-to-switch marketing is complete garbage. Whole-wheat or multigrain or filled-with-wood-chips pasta, whatever you want to call it, has hardly any more fiber than the regular stuff. Like 2 to 4 grams more. All that fuss and extra expense and dark brown, muddy pasta for 2 extra grams of fiber? No sir! I can make up that extra fiber by eating a quarter cup of raspberries or half an apple. I’ll stick to my beloved national dish, thank you very much.

Serving Sizes

One reason Italians can enjoy their pasta every day is because they don’t overindulge. America must have the biggest serving spoons in the world, because we just heap mounds of food on our plates.

A good-sized, healthy serving of pasta is one cup of cooked pasta. That’s 2 ounces of dried pasta, or 4 ounces when it cooks up. If you want to eat more than that, just plan the rest of your day accordingly. Double up on the spaghetti and cut back on the cheese.

How Fabulous People Cook Pasta

What’s the right way to cook pasta? It’s a simple question, yet somehow everyone has a different answer. Well, this is my book, and I’m going to give you my answer (which of course is the right one). This is how the most fabulous people in the world do it:

How Fabulous People Cook Pasta

Step 1
•
Use the Right Pot and the Right Amount of Water

For 1 pound of pasta,
use a deep, 6- to 8-quart pot. Fill it three quarters full of water. If you use too much water, it will boil over. If you use too little, the pasta won’t cook well.

Step 2
•
Salt the Water

If you add salt to the water,
it won’t keep the pasta from sticking, but it will help bring out the flavor of the pasta. (If you’re on a salt-sensitive diet, though, for heaven’s sake, skip this step!)

However, you have to add the salt at just the right time. If you add it too early, you’ll slow down your boil. If you add it too late, the pasta can’t absorb it.