Italian Pasta Tips
Dried pasta is eaten daily, while fresh pasta is for special occasions. Some tips on which sauces are paired with which pasta and some regional specialties. What I keep in my Dispensa/ Pantry.
Pasta is always in an Italian pantry. Dry pasta is a staple. Most families eat pasta at least once a day. There are tricks to cook pasta like an Italian. They have sauces that go with certain pasta shapes and many regional specialties. I will share some of my favorites. Recipes will be behind the paywall for the paid subscribers. Think about joining if you want to learn to cook like an Italian. This is part of my culinary memoir I am writing for my 40th year in Italy and 70th birthday.
Fresh pasta is a dish usually kept for special occasions as it is time-consuming and takes longer to digest. If you know anything about Italians, digestion is always important. Sunday lunch is when the Mamma or the Nonna bring out their famous dishes. Fresh pasta almost always entails a slow sauce that takes hours to cook.
There are egg-based pastas and water-based pastas, which are eaten freshly made. Dried pasta is made with flour and water and is often extruded through bronze dies. It is slow-dried to keep in your pantry.
Lasagna, ravioli, and tortellini are all time-consuming dishes to make.
Fettuccine, tagliatelle, and other rolled pasta are rolled out and hung around the kitchen while the sauces are cooked.
Pasta Grannies videos are a great place to watch Nonna make regional specialties. Depending on the region, those kinds of pasta are always fresh, with or without eggs. I don’t have a Nonna, but I had a Florentine mother-in-law who NEVER made fresh pasta. She grew up during the war, and her family never made pasta. She would spend hours making a “sugo”( Tuscan ragu).
Living in a city, finding a fresh pasta shop nearby or even grocery stores that sell a large selection is easy.
Fresh pasta cooks quickly. There are quick sauces you can also prepare while the water boils.
Here are some of my favorites.
Simple fresh egg pasta. Most people have an Atlas metal rolling machine or a accessory for your Kitchen Aid.
Nonna rolls out her dough on a table with a long rolling pin. Emilia Romagna is home to the fresh egg dough.
1 60-gram egg for every 100 grams of 00 Italian flour.
American flour absorbs more, and you need to know how much your egg weighs.
As you increase the recipe, your measurements can go off, especially if you use a measuring cup to measure the flour.
It seems like the simplest recipes are the most complicated.
Freshly cut pasta. This width can be called tagliatelle or fettuccine. Wider pasta is pappardelle.
It is used to make many pastas.
In Bologna, the lasagna is made with green egg pasta , spinach is used to make the dough green. Ragu and besciamella sauce. No mozzarella or ricotta is used.
Tortellini are another pasta from Emilia Romagna, filled with a meat filling. They can be served as pasta with sauce or, more traditionally, in broth.
Tuscany has egg pasta as well, but also we have a flour and water pasta called Pici. It was usually found around Siena and then farther south into Umbria were the name changes. They can be found as strozzapreti ( priest chokers) or umbricelli ( worms).
I love to teach making pici. It’s so easy and fun to involve the family as well. Have your sauce made, prepare a salad and a dessert, and serve some appetizers while everyone is working. It’s a pasta party.
Dry pasta is the base for most Italian families. There are so many shapes and each shape has sauces that complement the shape.
There are long shapes like spaghetti which comes in several sizes, from thin spaghettini to thick bucatini which have a whole in the middle and are really chewy and found mostly in Rome. Cooking time varies from 8 minutes to 14 minutes for the thicker version.
I worked in a fresh pasta company in California. We had Italian machines. The owner called local restaurants in the morning and took orders. We made orders each day, and they were delivered to the restaurants by lunchtime. It was perfect; we made the batches to order, and there was very little leftover pasta. What was left over was sold to walk-in clients. NO WASTE.
We also specialized in flavored pastas: lemon and black pepper, chili, and squid ink as well as the classic plain egg pasta.
The stainless steel cutter is visible in the photo. The sizes were the smallest angel hair, a square spaghetti called spaghetti alla chittara, and then fettucine and pappardelle.
You can also simply roll out large sheets for lasagna noodles. If you are making ravioli, you need to roll out the pasta and fill right away.
In the south, they make more flour and water-based pasta. I have traveled to Puglia and Sicily often, and those are the shapes I make the most. They use a Semola flour. There are a couple of variations, Semola and semola rimacinata ( a finer grind). In America, it’s sold as semolina. It gets confusing as semolina in Italy is cream of wheat.
In Puglia you find cavatelli, note the special board or making the pasta.
and orecchiette- In Bari, you will find the housewives making and selling the pasta on the street in front of their homes.
There are various sizes with different names and different flours. The flour used on the left-hand pasta is called grano arso. When they harvested the wheat fields and then burned them, the farm workers would take the burnt wheat kernels they found and ground them into flour. The flavor is really interesting. Recently, companies have roasted the grains and ground them for a commercial version.
The classic pairing for the orecchiette is cooking with broccoli rabe.
This is a fancier restaurant presentation with a dollop of tomato sauce and the local specialty ricotta salata. Salted Ricotta, which you grate on top of the pasta.
This is the simple version you find in most restaurants and at home.
Below is one of my favorite recipes with cavatelli, a kale and sausage sauce. Very little tomato.
Sicily uses the same flour and water pasta with the semola, but has other shapes. My favorite is called busiate.
It is traditionally served with a Sicilian red pesto from the Trapani area.
In nearby Castelvetrano, my friend Filippo’s family owns a flour mill and grows ancient varieties of Sicilian wheat and then make dry pasta from it as well.
Dried pasta- There are shapes that are all over Italy, penne, rigatoni, fusilli, farfalle and then there are so many regional shapes.
My local grocery store is called the COOP. They have commissioned a line of pasta from Gragnano for sale in the store with their label.
Rummo is a brand from outside of Naples which opened in the 1800’s. It was destroyed by a flood and they rebuilt so are a popular brand.
My husband is picky about his pasta. We don’t buy the commercial DeCecco or Barilla unless they have some special pasta no one else produces.
He prefers the higher quality extruded pasta, made with Italian flour and dried slowly. It holds up better to cooking and doesn’t overcook. They take “al dente”very seriously.
The cheaper pasta tend to overcook easily and also don’t have the texture which allows the sauces to stick to the pasta.
Some unusual dried pasta’s.
Top left is the original “spaghetti o’s” a pasta from Sicilym where the wheat is grown on land taken back from the mafia. The Timballo di anelleti,the baked dish made with them. On the far right, a soup pasta made from the curve that forms when drying spaghetti, which is extruded- no waste!
Middle left—Large pasta for stuffing and baking. Middle photo: another artisanal brand, San Marzano Tomatoes. Right is one of my favorite brands from Naples, Setaro.
Bottom left'- Another family brand I know is also in the USA. La Fabbrica del Pasta, they also make a great GF pasta.In the middle and right photo are women handrolling a long fusilli pasta, which is then sold dried and made by the Gentile family in Gragnano.
I talk about Gragnano a lot as I have visited several times. They have a long history of making pasta. The mills which ground the flour where up in the valley so it made sense for the pasta companies to be there as well.
This is how the pasta was dried. Foto from the Faella company. The pasta is available through Gustiamo in NY.
The wind came down from the hills and the location, temperature were perfect.
I have so much to say about pasta. I will post this for everyone to read and then post my recipe PDF later this week for those with the paid membership.
This year, the paid members receive weekly new recipes and often video lessons to become Italian cooks, as I did, one recipe at a time.
Several years ago I owned an Atlas machine. I made fresh pasta and loved the texture and freshness. Recently on a trip to Naples, I bought dried pasta from a company based in Gragnano. I have been using their pasta for a couple years and it’s just superior to De Cecco, which isn’t terrible if you have nothing else in the cupboard. Barilla is far worse than De Cecco.
This article was FABULOUS! Thank you