Ingredient: Pasta - General
Category: Pasta & Noodles
Season: All
Pasta is an Italian food made from a dough using flour, water and/or eggs .
The dough is shaped and can be stored . Pasta is boiled prior to consumption.
There are many variations of shapes and ingredients that are all called pasta . A few examples include spaghetti (solid cylinders), macaroni (tubes or hollow cylinders), fusilli (swirls), and lasagna (sheets).
Pasta can also denote dishes in which pasta products are the primary ingredient , served with sauce or seasonings.
The word comes from Italian pasta which shares its origins with "paste", meaning "dough", "pasta", or "pastry" as in "small cake".
Ingredients
There are many ingredients that can be used to make pasta dough .
They range from a simple flour and water mixture , to those that call for the addition of eggs, spices and cheeses, or even squid ink to the dough.
Under Italian law, dry pasta can only be made from durum wheat semolina flour . This flour has a yellow tinge in colour.
Italian pasta is traditionally cooked al dente (Italian: "to the teeth", meaning not too soft) .
Abroad, dry pasta is frequently made from other types of flour (such as farina), but this yields a softer product, which cannot be cooked al dente.
Particular varieties of pasta may also use other grains and/or milling methods to make the flour .
Some pasta varieties , such as Pizzoccheri, are made from buckwheat flour.
Various types of fresh pasta include eggs (pasta all'uovo).
Gnocchi (is the Italian name for a variety of dumpling.) are often listed among pasta dishes, although they are quite different in ingredients (mainly milled potatoes).
Accompaniments
Common pasta sauces in Northern Italy include:
Pesto and ragù alla bolognese ;
In Central Italy , simple tomato sauce, amatriciana and carbonara.
In Southern Italy , spicy tomato, garlic, and olive oil based sauces, often paired with fresh vegetables or seafood.
Varieties include: puttanesca, pasta alla norma (tomatoes, eggplant and fresh or baked cheese), pasta con le sarde (fresh sardines, pine nuts, fennel and olive oil), spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino (litterally with garlic, (olive) oil and hot chili peppers).
In the United States Fettuccine Alfredo, with butter and cheese, and spaghetti with tomato sauce with or without ground meat or meatballs are popular Italian-style dishes.
As pasta is introduced elsewhere in the world , it has been incorporated into a number of local cuisines that may have significantly different ways of preparations from those of its country of origin.
In Hong Kong, the local Chinese has adopted pasta, primarily spaghetti and macaroni , as an ingredient in the Hong Kong-style Western cuisine.
In the territory's Cha chaan tengs, pasta, most commonly macaroni, is cooked in water, and served in broth with ham or frankfurter sausages, peas, black mushrooms, and optionally eggs reminiscent of noodle soup dishes. This is often a course for breakfast or light lunch fare.
The method often involves cooking the pasta well beyond the al dente stage and washing the starches off the pasta after cooking, measures frowned upon in Italy or in Hong Kong's more authentic Italian eateries
Originally, pasta in Italy was a conception of sheer genius. It began with growing the highest-quality hard wheat, and the name given to this specific type of wheat was durum, from the Latin, meaning hard.
Making the pasta
After the pasta maker had purchased exactly the right grain, the next important stage was finding the right miller to mill the grain to a certain precise specification – and not to a fine, powdery flour but to something called semolina, which, in Italian, means semi-milled and is quite unlike flour, as semolina is made up of tiny, coarse, corn-coloured granules with sharp edges.
The skill of the pasta maker was to then carefully mix the semolina with cold water. Then, after the mixing came the shaping, and the pasta was forced through special bronze dyes, which gave it a specific texture.
After that the pasta was dried in open-windowed lofts where either the mountain air or sea breezes, or both, depending on the region. could circulate. This carefully monitored drying process could take up to two days |