Pasta Improv (eBook)

How to Improvise in Classic Italian Style

Erica De Mane (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

1999 | 1. Auflage
385 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-62309-381-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Do you, like millions of Americans, love pasta? Do you nonetheless find yourself preparing the same old pasta sauces over and over again? Wouldn't you like to be able to spice up your pasta routine, to use fresh new ingredients and discover new methods and flavor combinations? With the help of Erica De Mane's timely and imaginative book, you'll learn to throw together an impromptu and delicious pasta dish the way the Italians do, creatively making use of whatever's on hand or whatever looks good in the market. You will develop the confidence and creativity in the kitchen to approach and cook pasta the way it's done in Italy.

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Do you, like millions of Americans, love pasta? Do you nonetheless find yourself preparing the same old pasta sauces over and over again? Wouldn't you like to be able to spice up your pasta routine, to use fresh new ingredients and discover new methods and flavor combinations? Now, with the help of Erica De Mane's timely and imaginative book, you can. You'll learn to throw together an impromptu and delicious pasta dish the way the Italians do, creatively making use of whatever's on hand or whatever looks good in the market. You will develop the confidence and creativity in the kitchen to approach and cook pasta the way it's done in Italy. Erica De Mane emphasizes pasta's enormous versatility and shows you how to think for yourself when it comes to combining ingredients. She explains the basic cooking techniques, sauces, and essential equipment so that you can move beyond the boundaries of recipes and conventional approaches to pasta cooking. She teaches you how to break down recipes and reinvent them, progressing from the fundamental to the complex, and how to customize recipes to suit your whim or your pantry-so you'll always end up with an exciting, flavorful, and absolutely authentic Italian dish. Drawing on her extensive travels through the southern regions of Sicily, Apulia, and Campania, and on her respect for the innovations of American chefs, Erica De Mane provides a wealth of new ideas-from Cavatelli with Morels, Montasio, and Arugula to Ravioli with Scallop Mousse and Red Pepper Sauce to Veal and Roasted Artichokes Lasagne-that make an easy transition to the American kitchen. If you're tired of slavishly following recipes all the time, or hesitant to include a favorite ingredient unless it's explicitly called for, fear no more. The clearly laid out recipe ideas and blueprints for creative pasta-making in this book are what every free-spirited pasta lover interested in taste and authenticity has been waiting for. Among Pasta Improvvisata's unique features:-Three superbly organized sections: Pasta and Vegetables, Pasta and Fish, and Pasta and Meat-Twelve instructive pages of drawings, showing all the different types of pasta-A list of recommended sources for all sorts of Italian specialty ingredients-A chapter on making fresh pasta, including unusual variations such as Red Pepper Pasta, Saffron Pasta, and Fennel Seed PastaThis all-inclusive, intelligent, and approachable cookbook will enable all pasta lovers, the novice and the experienced home cook alike, to have more fun-and freedom-in the kitchen than ever before.

Textauszug

Pasta and Vegetables

Vegetables are the heart of Italian pasta cooking and always make up the majority of recipes in any pasta cookbook. They are the food Italians (and many Americans) live on. I eat pasta with a vegetable sauce at least three times a week, sometimes as a first course, more often as a main dish, maybe with a chunk of salami or cheese alongside, the way they do in southern Italian households. The combinations and varied seasonings you can create with vegetables for pasta sauces are all but endless.

For me, the charm of a good vegetable sauce lies in its clear, well-defined flavors. After years of throwing every herb available, plus garlic and onions, into every sauce I made, I learned discretion. Now I’ll choose one herb for a zucchini sauce and maybe leave out the garlic if I’m using leeks. Anything superfluous is left out. I adhere to this idea especially when cooking with vegetables, because I don’t want to overwhelm fresh produce with too many adornments. This doesn’t mean every vegetable sauce has to be bone simple, but it needs to be well-thought-out and carefully constructed. For example, a pasta primavera might contain five different vegetables, but each one should be added to the sauce with respect for its cooking time so you don’t wind up with a half-raw, half-mushy vegetable mess. If you think about this when choosing ingredients for your vegetable sauces, you’ll be one step closer to creating dishes with beauty and integrity.

Since the subject is so broad, I’ve divided the pasta-and-vegetable chapter into sections, each one containing ways to begin with the basic recipes and build from them. The tomato sauce chapter, for example, lists many approaches to cooking a tomato sauce, in addition to examples of how to embellish each sauce to create more complex dishes. And under each dish I offer several variations to stimulate your own creativity. Tomato sauces serve as platforms for more intricate pasta sauces. If you dissect a puttanesca or an amatriciana sauce, you will discover a simple tomato base to which tasty ingredients have been added. I do the same in the garlic section. There is also a section on traditional vegetables used to dress pasta and ways for you to produce unique dishes. Next you’ll see some inspirational ways to use seasonal produce. Our own supermarket vegetables such as leeks, squash, parsnips, snap peas, and cabbage make surprisingly good pasta sauces and stuffings for lasagne and ravioli.

Making Tomato Sauce

Tomatoes can be the basis for a sauce, or they can be the sauce itself. After you’ve mastered a few basic tomato sauces, you’ll discover how many other pasta sauces start with such a simple foundation. For example, adding anchovies, olives, and capers to a tomato base gives you an instant puttanesca. Spice up a plain tomato sauce with fresh or dried hot chiles, and you’ve got an arrabbiata sauce. Brown a little pancetta along with the chile and you’ve made a classic amatriciana sauce from the Abruzzo. Letting a handful of clams open in the tomato sauce creates a classic red clam sauce. You can also perk up yesterday’s plain tomato sauce by adding sautéed mushrooms or artichokes or by simmering shrimp or scallops in the sauce while you gently reheat it. Afterthoughts are easily incorporated into tomato sauces, which are accepting of your whims.

Sometimes it’s not apparent when you look through a cookbook that a group of recipes actually share the same foundation, but it can be especially true of pasta sauces. It’s a matter of adding or omitting an ingredient or two to create a different taste and the illusion of something unknown and mysterious.

Matching Pasta with Sauce

Despite the fact that pasta has become quite whimsical in the hands of many American and even Italian chefs, several traditional thoughts governing what sauce goes with what pasta still make sense to me. I wouldn’t prepare a cream sauce with dried spaghetti any sooner than I would make an aglio e olio (garlic and oil sauce) with fresh egg tagliatelle. But some of my thinking has changed. In my travels to southern Italy, I’ve noticed a restaurant trend toward serving fresh egg tagliatelle with white or red clam sauce. This is a dish that I’ve always had with dried spaghetti or other long, thin dried pasta such as bucatini or capellini. But this new dish seems fresh to me, and less austere than the original spaghetti version.

Try to use an artistic eye when matching sauces with pasta shapes. Ingredients can be cut in different ways to accommodate different pasta shapes. I love cutting celery, carrots, and onions in small cubes, sautéing them in olive oil, and tossing the mix with tubetti—which is basically the same shape. Small cubes of zucchini look pretty nestled in the hollowed rounds of orecchiette. Thin strips of sautéed bell pepper wrap nicely around penne or fusilli. The recipes that follow reflect my current thoughts on pairing sauce with pasta. Some are based on strict tradition, and others bend the rules a bit.

On Measuring

When I worked in the test kitchen of a major food magazine, I discovered firsthand just how subjective taste really is. I would prepare recipes and then the editors would all taste the dishes and write their reactions on a chart. I noticed that their comments on saltiness always varied greatly. “Too salty,” and, of the same dish, “needs salt” or “way too bland” or “horrendously oversalted.” This perplexed me. People’s taste for salt obviously varies greatly. Many cookbooks and magazines include salt quantities in their recipes. This, I think, is a bad idea. Personal salt tolerance aside, it is extremely hard to judge without tasting the intrinsic and varying saltiness of many ingredients—ham, for instance, or cheeses—how much salty flavor these foods will add to a dish.

And speaking of salt as it pertains to pasta, it actually is crucial that you salt your pasta water. You cannot make up for lack of it by salting the sauce—the dressed pasta will always taste flat. This is the same as the need to salt meat or fish during a preliminary sautéing, even though ingredients may be added later or the dish is to be simmered, as in a stew. Without that early salting, the dish will remain somewhat bland and never be what it could be. You need that initial infusion to round it out.

Saltiness, like many other aspects of flavor, is a matter of personal taste. Constant tasting is vital to good cooking. There is really no way to season food without following the cooking process with your tongue and nose. Sauces reduce, and many qualities, especially saltiness, intensify with long cooking and evaporation. The flavors of fresh herbs, however, tend to diminish after long cooking.

How much of an ingredient you add to a dish will depend on the freshness and quality of that ingredient. Fresh garlic has a much milder flavor than older dried garlic, and the longer it stews, the milder its flavor becomes. Olives vary greatly in saltiness and pungency, so it is a good idea to taste any olives—or capers or prosciutto or anchovies or Pecorino cheese—or anything—before adding them to a dish, just to get an idea of what you are working with. Then you can decide how much of the ingredient you want or whether you want it at all.

A problem I’ve had with many cookbook and food magazine recipes is that the amounts of certain ingredients called for are so small that they could never contribute to the recipe. Three basil leaves in a tomato sauce meant to feed six? What is the point? You go out and buy a big bunch of basil, only to use three leaves? Three grindings of black pepper? One scraping of nutmeg? Taste to see what the written recipe produces, and if you want more basil, add it. You’d be amazed to know the quantities of seasonings that go into good restaurant cooking. I almost inevitably add a bit more of whatever is called for, partly because my taste tends to favor the robust but also because I find that people who follow recipes religiously tend to make rather bland meals.

As a general rule, try not to measure when you cook, unless you are baking. Learn to trust your eye and palate. When deciding how much tomato to add to a pasta sauce, look at the amount of pasta and judge how much sauce will cover it. Some cooks get used to placing small amounts of ingredients, such as chopped garlic, pepper, or herbs, in the palm of their hand before adding them to a dish. This provides a frame of reference and separates the ingredient from the others scattered over the kitchen counter. Try to think not in terms of adding a teaspoon or a cup but of how weak or strong a taste you want a certain ingredient to have in relationship to the whole. How oniony do you want your sauce to be? Should it be spicy? Do you want to taste the wine or just use it as a subtle component to bring the dish together? Do you want a full-out tomato sauce or just pieces of tomato for accent? Are you making a meat sauce, or will you just sauté a little pancetta to give richness to the vegetables? Usually when I cook I have an idea of the end result I want, and I start by thinking about how I’m going to get there.

Some Basic Information for Cooking Pasta

The most important point when cooking pasta is to make sure your cooking water returns quickly to a boil after you drop in the pasta. Pasta left cooking in slow-simmering water will become mushy and have a tendency to clump. For a pound of pasta, choose a large pot (6 to 8 quarts). Fill it slightly more than three-quarters full with...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.7.1999
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Essen / Trinken
• ISBN-10: 1-62309-381-3 / 1623093813
• ISBN-13: 978-1-62309-381-5 / 9781623093815