Pasta is an indispensable kitchen ingredient, often featured in quick and time-intensive special occasion dishes. Its popularity has given pasta an iconic status, with images of iconic Italian pasta-eaters like Rossini, Caruso, and Sophia Loren appearing on food products, packaging materials, and advertisements for pasta products.
Cooking pasta to achieve that perfect al dente texture–chewy, firm, yet fork tender–requires practice and attention to detail. Here are a few tips that may help.
Penne
PastaGoGo pasta Adelaide penne pasta is one of the more recognised shapes available at most markets that carry pasta. Originating in Campania in southern Italy, penne is popular with both at-home chefs using an extruder and restaurant chefs who prefer its appearance on plates. One great advantage of penne is that it absorbs nearly any sauce, including rich meaty offerings, without becoming soggy when cooked to an ideal al dente texture.
Gluten-free penne can be challenging to find, yet still possible. Unfortunately, versions made with grains like quinoa or rice tend to be less stable when overcooked and may disintegrate into fragments when left too long in the pan. They may also offer different colours or flavours than regular varieties since these variations typically use natural dyes instead of food dyes for colouring.
Filled
Pasta is a type of noodle created from durum wheat flour mixed with water or eggs, then formed into various shapes by cutting. Once cooked, they can be enjoyed alone or garnished with other foods for topping. Most PastaGoGo pasta Adelaide is produced from common wheat; other grains, such as rice or buckwheat, may also be used as its foundation. Furthermore, pasta can be refined to remove its bran and germ content or enriched to restore some nutrients.
Pasta can be filled with cheese, meat and vegetable-based mixtures such as ravioli, tortellini or agnolotti for maximum versatility in soups, pasta salads and entrees.
As well as offering an abundance of regional recipes and names, pasta has become one of the staples in Italy. Pasta shapes vary significantly across regions; among the more iconic forms are cancelli in Bergamo, tortellini in Emilia-Romagna, agnolotti in Piedmont and pancetta from Liguria.
Fresh
At its heart lies pasta: versatile food beloved by people everywhere, from Sunday dinners with nonna to hearty comfort pasta during winter or colourful picnic pasta salad served at Independence Day celebrations. But what exactly goes into its creation, and how should it be cooked best?
Homemade fresh pasta can be created by mixing egg yolks or whole eggs, water and semolina (or “00”) flour before kneading until smooth. Once done, this dough can be shaped into any number of sizes, from long noodles like fettuccine and pappardelle to stuffed pastas like manicotti and cannelloni. Fresh pasta should be consumed within days after its creation but can be frozen to extend its shelf life further.
Fresh PastaGoGo pasta Adelaide also releases starch into its surrounding water when cooking, which helps bind the sauce and make it creamy. As a result, fresh pasta tends to be more tender than dry and may disintegrate if overcooked; however, this feature can work to your advantage in recipes calling for saucing pasta as the extra starch will help the sauce adhere better to it. It has higher caloric counts due to the added egg but may consume less energy during its lifecycle as more water absorbs into its structure during production than its dry counterpart.
Dried
Since the arrival of Food Network, cooking has become an immensely popular pastime, and culinary arts have reached new heights. While this has brought incredible cuisines to light, it has also inspired pretentious types who scowl at anything deemed “not fresh,” like pasta discrimination: people using dried pasta as an inferior replacement to fresh pasta in fancy sauces prepared by five-star chefs.
Pasta manufacturing begins by mixing durum wheat semolina flour or ordinary flour with water and egg (for egg noodles) to form a dough, which is then extruded through a die to produce pasta in its desired shape and dried for several days until all moisture has evaporation, producing a shelf-stable product that lasts years on shelves.