Pasta with sauce can be very different. After all, there are more than a dozen of the main types of pasta in Italy, and you can add several hundred different sauces to them. Having mastered the basic rules for making pasta and sauce, you can confidently vary the recipes, serving a new, hearty and flavorful dish each time.
How to cook pasta properly
In order to cook any kind of pasta, you will need a lot of water. The Italians calculate its quantity at the rate of 1 liter for every hundred grams of dry products, plus one more liter. So, to boil 500 grams of pasta, you will need 6 liters of water. Pasta is placed in boiling water, brought to a boil and cooked without covering, stirring occasionally.
Italians believe that for every 100 grams of pasta, you need to put 10 grams of salt.
Fresh egg pasta such as fettuccine, tagliatelle, lasagna leaves are boiled for just a few minutes - 2-3. Thin and dry, from durum wheat and without eggs, boil for 7 to 10 minutes. Thick-walled pasta made from durum wheat is cooked for the longest time - from 10 to 15 minutes. If a thick, hot, homogeneous sauce is added to the pasta, it is slightly undercooked, and put hot in the gravy so that the pasta is already cooked in it. So the pasta is saturated with sauce as much as possible. If the gravy is minced meat or chopped ingredients, cook the pasta until cooked through. Also, cook the pasta until cooked if you are going to mix it with pesto or sauces made with olive oil, without heating it.
How to choose a pasta sauce
Italians have a whole science of how to choose a sauce for pasta, but if you do not pretend to be a professional chef, it is enough to remember a simple rule - homogeneous sauces are suitable for smooth pasta varieties, and thick sauces with pieces of vegetables, meat or fish are suitable for corrugated ones. This is due to the fact that puree sauces are better absorbed into the smooth surface of pasta, and the chopped pieces slide off it, but in the grooved one they get stuck.
That is why, for example, Italians do not recognize spaghetti bolognese as "their" dish, since meat bolognese sauce, from their point of view, does not suit long, even spaghetti.
It is also said in Italy that "less is more" for sauce, meaning that the less ingredients you use, the more you can taste it. The simplest pasta sauce has just three ingredients - olive oil, grated sheep cheese, and a generous helping of freshly ground black pepper. The main bases for more complex sauces are mashed tomatoes or cream. So, if you add a little fried garlic and onions, fresh basil to a tomato trade wind, and then stew - you get the famous marinara sauce. Melted butter mixed with heavy cream, salt, pepper and grated Parmesan cheese - delicate Alfredo sauce. Numerous ingredients can be added to these two base sauces - fried minced meat, bacon, pieces of boiled poultry, spicy herbs, vegetables, seafood. Having mastered several recipes of Italian sauces, after a while you will confidently create your own variations.
