Expert’s Guide to Italian Pasta

Byamazingfoodstv


Testing expert Jack Bishop breaks down everything you need to know when shopping for your next pasta at the supermarket.

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42 Comments

  1. DeCecco is good pasta. I break mine in half, boil in a small pot with just as much water as it takes to cover it, and definitely no salt. There's more than enough salt in the sauce and cheese and I want my dish to taste like food, not a mouthful of sodium.

  15. Putting tagliatelle (pasta all’uovo) as a sibling of speghetti, linguine, rigatoni and gemelli (all of them being pastasciutta) really triggered me. Tagliatelle are a different product. And why you always use “noodles” for pasta?! That’s gross.

  16. You know I have enjoyed pasta all my life. I've eaten expensive pasta, I've eaten cheap dollar pasta and I can say definitively that the difference between good and bad pasta is so small to be almost non existent and the people whom express continually how they can absolutely taste the difference tend to be full of BS. The only bad pasta I have ever really experienced was a gluten free spaghetti and maybe a poorly produced dollar pasta. Both were a little slimy where the flour absorbed too much water before the middle was done enough.

  18. Pretty sure sure Serious Eats has dispelled the myth of needing an extraordinary amount of water to boil pasta in. It’s pretty disappointing to see america’s test kitchen gloss over this inaccuracy, losing their grip on cooking prowess.

  21. I disagree with him saying slow dried is not important. Heat dried pasta has a slightly scorched taste and dark yellow, sometimes almost orange cast. It's almost slippery. A good pasta should be a pale straw color, almost off-white. De Cecco, if you can find it at your local supermarket, they don't always have a good variety of shapes. It is by far the best brand that is readily available in places like Walmart and such. Not everybody can afford to go to specialty groceries. I also don't like gamelli. Barilla has a huge variety but it's heat dried and low quality. It's cheap tho.

  29. Slow dried is very important…I don't know what type of PBS/nazi dummy-science you used to determine it wasn't important, but it is EXTREMELY important. Par for the course with PBS "sCiEnCe" nowadays. Watch the series by Alex on YT about dried pasta if you want a good summary about why.

  30. De Cecco is my go-to, $2.39/lb USD at my local market and consistently good. One of my favorite characteristics of De Cecco is when I put it in soup and have leftovers it doesn't swell up and disintegrate like cheap pastas, though generally I try to keep the pasta separate from the soup until I'm ready to eat it. I've come to realize I'm not one of those people with a palate fine enough to appreciate pastas pricing in at $8.00+ per pound and I'm okay with that. I grew up on Creamette spaghetti, so I really had nowhere to go but up as an adult.

  32. I really like making macaroni and cheese with cavatappi instead of macaroni. The shape is more whimsical and my favorite macaroni and cheese recipe calls for vegetables that make it look amazing with that shape.

  37. If your pasta dish tastes bland, you are not salting the water enough for the pasta. The rule of thumb is it should be as salty as the sea. On the flip side, if your pasta water is really salty, you got to watch yourself when you add a little pasta water into the sauce on the back end.

  39. 1:35 There's one thing I would dispute from this video: this notion that you need to boil pasta in a lot of water. In a lot of the dishes that I make, some of the pasta water is used in the sauce, and the starch in that water helps the sauce thicken. When I make aglio e olio, I use one pan, barely enough water to cook the pasta in, and only as much salt as I intend to eat in the dish. 100% of the starch from the pasta is retained, and it makes a fantastic smooth emulsion with the garlic flavored oil. You can't get as smooth an emulsion without using the starchy pasta water. But if you cook the pasta in a massive amount of water, the water simply will not be as starchy because the starch would be diluted.

  40. My Italian ex- boyfriend's family says to combine pasta shapes, like spaghetti with radiatore or wagon wheels to better hold the sauce. They also say that condensed clam chowder soup is a great cheat for linguine with clam sauce. I do not know if it's true. Just what they say.

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