Pasta

Hi everyone, welcome to potluck food talks. Today we're going to talk about pasta. So what are your thoughts on pasta Phil? Pasta, I mean it's like one of the most basic food staples I think all around the world regardless of whether you're in noodle eating countries like Asia or Italy obviously, you

know when we talk about pasta we're talking about mainly Italy. But I think regardless of where you're from or where you are it's like one of the most common sort of like quick easy fixed dinners these days, you know, it's become such a fundamental staple in every household. Yeah, I would say all over the world. I'm pretty sure if you go to Africa you will see a lot of people eating pasta, not to say all over America, north to south, it's a staple food everywhere. Yeah, absolutely.

What would you say are the dos and don'ts when it comes to cooking and eating pasta? Well, I mean, I think first of all, we need to narrow down like what we mean with pasta and you know, like if we mean, you know, noodle dough in general, you know, when you used to eat pasta, you know, I think it's easily discernible that you're talking about Italian noodles, right?

Yeah, Italian wheat based, I wouldn't even say dry pasta. We can talk about fresh pasta, but I think what everybody eats at home is dried pasta, right?

Yeah, definitely. Although, you know, it's like, I feel like the conception of what people think dried pasta and like fresh pasta, what the differences are, like I think that there's some misconception because I think it's really interesting that most people think that dried pasta is just like a convenience product and that fresh pasta is by default better than

dried pasta, which is, you know, not the case. It's just two different products. And I, for example, I always thought that that would like that's the way it is that fresh pasta

is better than dried pasta. But then, you know, like relatively recently, I found out that it's not that the dried pasta, it has a very, there's a very intricate process to making it and that, you know, also Italian chefs say there's certain things that they just wouldn't do with fresh pasta, just as there's certain things that it wouldn't do with dried pasta, you know?

Yeah, I completely agree. And actually, if we talk about Italians, it's super interesting because there are like, I don't know, like 100 different types of pasta, and each one has its own function. Some are done for specific sauces, the way they're shaped has also to do to absorb the sauce or so that the sauce sticks to the piece of pasta and all these kind of things that are super relevant when it comes to cooking pasta the Italian way.

At the same time, what you were just saying about dry versus fresh, I also have to say that, of course, there is crappy, cheap, dried pasta. I mean, what do you expect if you buy the one that costs 50 cents in the supermarket? It is what it is, you know, but if you get like a high quality pasta, sometimes I prefer that better than fresh pasta, actually.

Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, you know, like both have their place. Like there are things that I would make with fresh pasta, but there's like certain things that I would never make with fresh pasta, you know, like a cacio e pepe, you know, like just doesn't make sense to make it with fresh pasta. It's not what you use for that recipe. Could you go through the recipe briefly? I mean, a cacio e pepe is basically a pasta in a sort of emulsion of pecorino romano and

black pepper. You know, it's a very, very simple pasta dish where, you know, you make a emulsion with the cheese. It's like a carbonara without the egg and also using guanciale, which is the pork chow. Guanciale is wild boar, right? Like a boar ham. It's not necessarily boar, it's the chow, which is like a piece of meat from the jaw, like then the sort of neck underneath kind of like, it's very, very fatty. It's the cut, not the animal. Okay.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that there's guanciale from boar as well, but as far as I know, it's not necessarily boar. Okay. Yeah. But anyway, this is like a recipe that like you would never make it with fresh pasta. You'd always make it with dry pasta. And, you know, like I've heard from a lot of Italian

chefs that, like you said, you know, it's very important. It's just like sourcing any ingredient is deciding on which brand of dried pasta you use because there's huge quality differences, you know, you have, you know, really crappy ones, like supermarket ones that are super cheap. Then you have sort of like medium ranges like parina and then like kind of going up, you have things like the Checo. Super fun. It's my super favorite one.

Exactly. And then if you go like even further up, you have things like Monograni, you know, which is the brands that I see a lot of, you know, professional Italians using that make Italian food. You know, it's a little bit like when I was in Japan, you know, there were certain things that like pickles, for example, like we were buying pickles from a factory in the countryside and I would say sort of like, oh, why don't we make the pickles

like in-house? And they were like, well, there are people who specialize in this, done this for generations and they make an extremely good product. And for us, it's like, we're really happy that we can work with people who are experts in what they do. It's kind of the same, you know, I feel like this perception of dry pasta being like just a convenience product is just strong. You just remind me of Tampopo when you said Japanese pickles. We need to make that Tampopo episode by the way.

Yeah, definitely a movie reaction. So going back to pasta, I would say a few important things about the cooking process, because there are a few common misconceptions that I see over and over again in house cooks when they're cooking pasta. Because again, this is something everybody knows or thinks knows how to cook, especially drunk people. Rule number one, I would say a lot of water. Don't cook your pasta in a small pot, half full, don't do that. Just use a generous amount

of water and wait until it is boiling. That's pretty basic. There are some myths about when to add salt, if you should add it before or after the water boils, that doesn't matter at all. And then there is this common myth about adding oil to the water. Some people say this is something Italian, which is not at all, and which is actually a mistake because you want the pasta to be a little bit sticky, just enough so the sauce sticks to the pasta

and that the pasta is completely coated with sauce. So that this is the reason why some, let's say the penne rigate, that's why there are like tubes so that the pasta goes inside the tube and all these shapes and also the surface that has this like... The riffles. Exactly. This is again also to hold the sauce. And another one, of course, another one that

I see a lot is people straining the pasta and then adding cold water on top. That's also a bad move because again, you're washing all the starch away that makes the sauce stick. So these are pretty basic rules that every Italian knows. And every Italian screams when you see someone doing it wrong. Yeah, I think like one of the biggest mistakes that I see people do a lot is that they don't salt the water enough. You know, everybody knows that you need to salt the water, but

it makes such a huge difference, like the amount of salt that you put. When I cook pasta, I add salt by feel and let it dissolve and then I taste the water. It should be like very savory, you know, it should be kind of like if you would season the soup, you know, like that's kind of how salty you want your pasta to be. Because if it's not salty enough, then the pasta is going to absorb the water. And at the end you have a pasta that's very

bland. The pasta itself needs to be a little bit seasoned. Otherwise, you know, your sauce can be as nice as it wants, but then, you know, you add this other, you know, often it's like one-to-one sauce to pasta and the whole sort of flavor profile just goes down. So I think that's one of the most crucial things that like people don't do. They don't

salt the water enough. And one other thing that like I always find really annoying, especially with chefs, you know, chefs do this a lot, is that they really undercook the pasta, right? So we all know that overcooking pasta is really awful and everybody wants, everybody loves

the term al dente, you know, but especially chefs, they take it too far. They just don't cook the pasta enough and al pasta should be al dente, super important, but nobody wants your crunchy chewy pasta for star food, man, you know, sort of like you got to hit the right spot. Yeah, but there's on that. I think everybody has said, man, I've done that at least once.

Yeah, of course, especially at three o'clock in the morning when you make yourself like a quick sort of like feta cheese and canned bean pasta and then you just don't cook it enough and you're crunching away and you're sort of like, and you feel even shitty on yourself than you did before. You know, the worst drunken pasta story I have, dude, we were, we took like a road trip

and we arrived at this like a house next to the beach. We were completely drunk. Everybody we were like looking in the fridge of this house, what we found and that there were some cans of tomato and some pasta. So we cooked some pasta and after we ate the whole thing, somebody said, okay, now I can say the truth. Do you want to know the truth? We just cooked the pasta with swimming pool water because there wasn't anything else. No, but you can't be serious. Yeah, I know. That is terrible.

It was a long time ago. Another common mistake about cooking pasta at home that I see a lot, a lot of people do this. Perhaps most people do this is not mixing the sauce with the pasta, like serving the dry pasta and putting the sauce on top to the dish and then doing whatever and Italians always make the sauce with the pasta and then serve it if I'm not wrong. Right? Absolutely. I feel like surely there's situations where you don't do that, you know, but like

in general for sure. And I mean, even finishing the pasta the last like minute or so inside of the sauce. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Makes a huge difference. Yeah. Because then you get like this penne rigate filled with the sauce inside the tube and whatever shape you're using, you're making the magic at that moment and you can mix it as aggressively as in a pot in your dish. Yeah, absolutely. And like people, this like thing of Monte Care, you know, this process,

people really underestimate that they completely skip that process, you know, that step. They think they make the sauce, they make the pasta, they put the soup together and it's done,

you know. But I mean, this doesn't, you know, you don't have to do it or you shouldn't do it with every sort of pasta dish, you know, but like more often than not, you know, finishing the sauce, letting those like the starch release into the sauce, you know, and having the pasta like absorb a little bit of, you know, what you're cooking it in, it makes a huge difference. And also, you know, like I feel like people are kind of scared using pasta water to let

out their sauces while I find that it makes a huge difference, you know. Take for example, a pesto, right? And the pesto is usually, like even if you don't make it yourself, you buy a pesto in the supermarket, you know, and it's usually quite dry. If you take like just pasta, cook it, strain it, and then add the pesto and mix it in, it's going to be really, really dry. If you keep a little bit of pasta water from the very end of the cooking process,

then you add two or three tablespoons. The whole thing becomes creamy and like juicy. The pasta is coated and makes a huge difference. And nobody really does that. I think people are scared because they see this like salty soupy water. That's something every chef knows. Yeah. Every chef that has worked in a pasta station. Yeah, absolutely. So do you have any favorite sauce? Oh, man, I have a lot. Okay, so I'm a huge fan of aglio e olio because I've eaten so

many really bad versions of aglio e olio. Because I mean, it's really just it's so simple, right? It's just olive oil, garlic, and a little bit of pepperoncini. And then you know, some people add pasta to it, some people don't. But usually it's just oily, garlicky mess, right? And that's how I've kind of known it.

Nice. Yeah, I mean, it has its place. But if you make it right, and you know, you kind of see the garlic a little bit of olive oil, you pull it to a side, together with the pepperoncini, then you add the pasta into it with a little bit of the liquid, and you just give it that little bit of time. It makes this like oil water emulsion that's just really, really creamy and slick. And also, you know, like chopped parsley in it. And I also I add like a little bit of squeeze of lemon juice to

it because I feel like it cuts through it. It helps that like emulsion. And it's so simple. But if you get that emulsion right, it's super, super tasty. There is a simple one. I don't know if this has a name. I mean, I do like, like a carbonara, just egg yolks, and then just a shitloads of botarga. Do you know botarga? Of course. Man, it's like ocean parmesan. That sounds amazing. That sounds really good. What's your go to drunk pasta dish when you come home and just wake up in the morning?

Depends on what I have. I mean, if I have like this fried tomato from the jar, I will use that with parmesan. I sometimes do, I wanted to say my favorite sauce is probably puttanesca. Yeah. And sometimes I do like drunk puttanescas because I usually have anchovies. I always have lots of hot sauces. Perhaps I have some black olive puree somewhere and I just throw everything into the sauce and I make like a quick puttanesca.

Yeah, that sounds really good. I used to like my go to one that I always used to make was also starting with like a shitload of garlic and a shitload of chili. Just make it really, really spicy and really garlicky. And then add the tomato, let that cook a little bit. But you know, you want it to be quick. You just kind of want it to reduce it down a little bit. And then you add like a big spoon of Philadelphia cream cheese. And you just add

that in and it becomes this like cream cheese tomato sauce. It's kind of like pink, like a vodka sauce, you know, but like a spicy, that always hit the spot, you know, it was kind of like sitting there, you know, in your boxer shorts, just like eating straight out of the pan. Oh man, you just remind me, my friend Blanca once made like a lasagna. She just mixed a bolognese and a bechamel and she mixed everything. So it was like this creamy bolognese and she

made the lasagna with that. And what I did was like a variation of that, which was like dirty lasagna. I don't know how to call it because it's not really a layered lasagna. It was just taking this big tubes, rigatones, and mixing it with this kind of sauce and then putting it on a tray and making a rattan out of it with lots of cheese on top. So you

could actually cut and take slices out of it. But that mixture of making like a tomato sauce and mixing it with something creamy, it's really, really nice. Yeah, it's really good. It's really nice. I like that idea with the, with the cannelloni. It's that's really good. Yeah, rigatones. And I also, I have really nostalgic memories of pesto, the like my stepdad used to make fresh at home. And he would always mix it

with the pasta, but it would also have like little pieces of boiled potato in it. Oh nice. Yeah. But which is weird because like you don't usually mix carbs and carbs, but it was super, super nice. But there are also some strange rices here in Spain that are

also with potato. Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, talking about rice, one of my favorite pasta shapes is also because that's one that you can just like cook like a risotto in sauce and it gets this really sort of like slippery texture, you know, like, especially if you have like, like a cheese sauce kind of thing, it's super, super nice. Like Bordaveri risotto maybe? Exactly. Exactly like that. Bordaveri is this legendary pincho

bar here in San Sebastian. And they do a risotto, which is not made with rice, but with also this rice shaped pasta and they do it with like a high quality Villasalva cheese. So it's a super nice way to try Villasalva cheese. There is something I always say and people hate me for it. When I show this to foreigners, I say, yeah, this is like the best mac and cheese. No. And after the whole explanation, people go like, oh, okay. Okay. Now I get

it. Yeah, you're right. You're right. It's a classic now, you know, it's a classic dish. I wanted to ask you what are your secrets on a good pesto? On a good pesto, it has to be allamineutrient. Yeah, it's really not that difficult. I've seen people blanching the herbs, which I don't see the need of it. You just put everything together in a blender,

blend it and use it right away. As you say. I think like if you really want to go next level, you know, you do it in a big mortar and pestle and you almost whip it kind of like you would do with a rii or with an aioli, you know, and then, you know, you make it and then you eat it. You know, like I see a lot of people and like I've done a lot of times in restaurants also making huge batches of pesto, you know, putting it in jars, putting

a fill of oil on top and then kind of putting it in the fridge. And I just feel like that takes away from the essence of it. Yeah, the magic, you know, when you make it in a pestle and mortar and you get it right, it's really vibrant and green and it's really beautiful. I also think that like toasting the pine nuts is really key. Like if you don't do it too hard, you do slowly whenever you toast seeds and that's, you know, so it gets the heat

gets into the very center and you don't just have these like burns outside parts. I also think that's suddenly expected. So what are the ingredients again? Basil, olive oil, roasted pine nuts, a little bit of garlic and anything else and Parmesan, of course. Yeah. But that's basically it now. Yeah. Yeah. When you make it and you get it into be a sort of emulsion, I think it's very, very nice. Another sauce that I like a lot is Alamatriciana. Oh yeah.

That's usually done with bucatini and that's really nice. I really like that too. It's like a standard tomato sauce just with chunks of bacon. Yeah. What I think makes a difference there also is that it has, it starts off with like sweating down onions also some versions of I've eaten, they were not too fine. They were kind of like a little bit chockier and

just like just before caramelizing, you know, just like not brown, but kind of there. And I feel like that gave it like a real nice sweetness and then together with the bacon, you know, something that really caught my attention recently. I saw someone traveling to Naples. No, it was actually Bologna and they posted like a Bologna sauce. And I was like, what? This is nothing like my archetype of the Bologna sauce doesn't look like that.

This was like a light brown beef sauce. It seemed to have no tomato at all. And I was like, okay, that's unexpected. There are many things like this, like many misconceptions of sauces that since pasta is so global and people eat pasta everywhere, you would see like these kinds of things that like meatballs and spaghetti that were invented in some Disney movie and people think that's Italian, but non-Italian have ever seen meatballs on, on

spaghetti or like the carbonara. Some people have this pasteurized version that is made with cream and you know, and there are all of these past recipes and versions do not correspond with the original one. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, like you say, it's become such a, such a huge thing, you know, that's kind of like, I think we spoke about it in the cultural appropriation episodes, you know, like how things develop further, you know,

once they start getting adapted by a new food culture. So it's, it's really interesting to see. Also, you know, that pasta isn't usually eaten as a main course, that it's usually your part of a bigger sort of like menu. It's usually like a side dish. I mean, not a side dish as in like a starter. And you just get like a very small dish at the beginning. And that's a standard Italian menu. You start with a small pasta dish and then you have

whatever. And you never the main course and it's never like this big plate of pasta that we're used to. Yeah, it's not how we how we're doing it these days where pasta is just this thing that you cook way too much of and then eat it until you hate yourself, you know, like it's which I feel like is what most people do. They just cook way too much. And then afterwards, they're just like, Oh my god, I just can't get any more down my gutter.

Another one never break your spaghetti, please. Yeah, I mean, you know, you break the spaghetti, you break my heart. That's it for this week's episode of potluck food talks. If you like what we're doing, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can also find us on Instagram and tik tok as potluck food talks. The show airs every Monday.