It’s the one meal you can whip up in a few minutes, be it to keep the kids, your partner or yourself from going hungry.
Boil and add sauce, ta-dah, pasta ready. Not too difficult now…
But it’s also the kind of meal you could spend on hours on, perfecting it to a standard any Italian ‘momma’ would be proud of.
We want every meal we make to be delicious, but with a lack of time on our hands, sometimes even the meals with the most potential are just slapped up on a plate before everyone heads their own way after dinner again.
We’ve got some very easy expert tips for you to make sure every bowl of pasta you serve up will be savoured as if it was being eaten in the heart of Italy itself.
From now on, may your pasta be delicious, the kind that people request for dinner every evening…
So much potential!
Easy Expert Tip 1: Re-use Your Water
Add a few spoons of the pasta water to your sauce to loosen it when you add the pasta. The starch in the cooking water will help to bring the sauce and pasta together. This is especially important when your sauce contains cheese where the hot starchy liquid helps to emulsify it.
Easy Expert Tip 2: When To Mix It
Some chefs toss the cooked pasta in the sauce while others insist that you add the sauce to the pasta. The first method works well for Spaghetti Carbonara where you add the hot pasta to a mixture of eggs and cheese and the second works better if you have made too much sauce and need to control how much you add to the pasta.
Easy Expert Tip 3: Make Your Carbonara Really Special
When you are making Spaghetti Carbonara, heat the black pepper in a little oil in a pan first to toast it and bring out the flavour. It will transform your Carbonara whose success really depends on using lots of black pepper. There’s no need to share your secret trick…!
Easy Expert Tip 4: Ricotta It Up
Stir a spoon or two of ricotta into tomato sauces before you toss them with the pasta to make the sauce lighter and creamier.
Easy Expert Tip 5: Al Dente Or Not?
If you are tossing the hot pasta with the sauce over heat for a few minutes before you serve it, then it is better to slightly undercook your pasta to a little short of al dente. Otherwise the heat will continue cooking the pasta and your pasta will arrive at the table over-cooked. However, if you are adding to the pasta to a cold sauce, say to eggs and cheese in a Spaghetti Carbonara, you’ll need to make sure the cooked pasta is al dente or it will be under-cooked when it reaches the table.
Easy Expert Kitchen Tip:
Most people don’t realise that they need to clean the part of the knife where the blade and handle meet. This is where food gets trapped. Use a disinfectant regularly to clean the knife, especially where there are joins or small gaps where bacteria can lodge.
Any other pasta tips? Be sure to share them below…
