Italian Recipe Chatter

Like all food, pasta tastes best when it is homemade. While the task may seem daunting to some, there are some simple pasta recipes that virtually any home cook can create. Here is one of my favorites:

Ingredients:

3 whole eggs + 2 yolks
2 cups of flour
1 teaspoon of canola oil

Directions:

Beat the eggs and oil with an electric mixer, and then add the flour until the dough becomes too thick for the mixer to turn. Take the dough out of the mixer, and knead with flour until it is stiff. Divide the dough into balls about the size of an egg. Run the balls through the thickest setting of the pasta machine.

You will want to achieve a balance between keeping the noodles too wet and keeping them too dry. When the noodles are in a perfect, malleable, yet stiff state, cut them and you will have perfect homemade noodles.

My mother is a living museum of great Italian recipes. Although she’s well into her 80s and occasionally forgets the names of her many nieces and nephews, she has a mind like a steel trap when it comes to cooking. A conservative estimate would be that she has memorized hundreds of pasta recipes in minute detail, and it seems that every time I bring my family to her house we are treated to something new.

While I definitely inherited my mother’s passion for all things culinary, my memory is nowhere near as impeccable. A missed ingredient or two won’t always spoil the dish, but it can affect the outcome so dramatically as to prove shocking at times. With this in mind, I’ve started a vast collection of Italian cookbooks and loaded each one with bookmarks for my favorite recipes. That way I can refer back to them as often as necessary and treat my family to a consistently delicious dinner experience.

If you visit a restaurant that specializes in authentic Italian cuisine, you might be surprised to find a dearth of Americanized Italian food. Many restaurants in the New World make a mockery of genuine Italian cooking, dishing out massive portions of carbohydrate-rich food with little to balance it all out. In Italy, food is generally served in multiple courses, but the portions are much smaller.

And boy do Italians know how to make pasta sauce. A real Italian chef will typically offer two options: a red sauce and a white sauce. Marinara sauce features tomato as its main impetus and is does not include meat. An alfredo sauce will be anchored with cream, butter and parmesan, and it is almost always served over a bed of vegetables and lighter meats.

 What we know as Italian cuisine has evolved over the centuries. Some of the influences on Italian cuisine include the discovery of the New World, centuries of invasions by other countries, including France, Spain, and Austria and regional products. All of these influences have shaped what is one of the great cuisines in the world.

Venice is best known for its spectacular risotto, a dish whose ingredients vary by location within the Veneto, with fish and seafood being added to it the closer you are located to the coast and its high quality and highly prized vegetables particularly pumpkin, asparagus and radicchio being used as you move further away from the Adriatic Sea.

Deceptively simple in its preparation, pasta has been a cooking staple for centuries. Americans alone consume 14 pounds of pasta per year; imagine the vast quantities of spaghetti the Italians surely slurp. Few images say “family” like a boiling pot of pasta in a busy kitchen.

We all think we know how to cook pasta. Believe it or not, there are a few basic techniques used to improve the taste and texture of pasta. Try adding a pinch of sea salt to the pot to set up a tasty base for the succulent sauce. To anticipate the perfect consistency, do as the Italians do: test your pasta by tossing an occasional strand against the ceiling. If it sticks, you’re ready to dig in.