Serving Pasta The Authentic Italian Way

There Are A Few Old Traditions Worth Hanging On To

Okay, before we start, let me make this disclaimer: for all of you who are about to go the the “comments” section and scream about having the “right to do whatever the f**k I want with my food” or to castigate me for being a fussy, rule-bound old prig, let me say this: you do, and I am. There. With that out of the way, let's talk about the authentic Italian way to serve pasta.

There are two keys to serving authentic Italian pasta, and I'll get to them in a minute. But first, there are some basic pasta cooking rules that you've probably seen repeated over and over. However, because I am, indeed, a fussy, rule-bound old prig, I'm going to repeat them yet again.

Prima regola, don't break the pasta. Go ahead, I'm braced for it. “What difference does it make? It all tastes the same anyway. It fits better in my pot when I break it. It's easier to eat when it's broken up.” Does that about cover it? Good. Now, the explanation. Long pasta is long just because it's supposed to be long. It's part of the aesthetic of the dish and part of the cultural experience and tradition of making it and eating it. Some say that breaking long pasta is an insult to the skill and the craft of the pasta maker. Since most of what you buy in the store these days is machine made, I don't know how insulted the machines might be, but why take the chance? Bottom line? It's an Italian thing. Some rules are immutable and “don't break the pasta” is one of them. Or break it if you want. After all, you're gonna tell me it's your “right,” and it is. But it's not authentic and authenticity is what we're talking about here.

Secondo, salt the water. The only time you really get to enhance the flavor of pasta is in the cooking process. The pasta literally opens up during cooking to release starches and to take on flavor. After it's done, you can pour all the salt in the world on it and it's just gonna taste like salty noodles. Generous amounts of salt added to the water – about a tablespoon per quart – while the pasta is cooking is the only means of imparting proper seasoning to the finished dish. And save a little of the cooking water to help develop your sauce. The starchy, salty water acts as a flavoring and thickening agent that aids in the ability of the sauce to cling to the pasta as it enhances the overall taste of the finished dish. And you obviously don't want to rinse your pasta. You need some of that starch.

And while we're sort of on the topic, I'd like to find the old wife behind the old wives' tale about putting oil in the water to keep the pasta from sticking. Chemistry 101 says oil and water don't mix. All you're going to get is oily water.

Ultima regola, don't cook the pasta to mush. Al dente is the key. It should be a little firm “to the tooth” when you bite into it. If you want to overcook your pasta until it looks and tastes like something out of a Chef Boyardee can, go for it! It's your right. But it's not authentic.

And now that brings us to the first of those two keys to the authentic Italian way of serving pasta.

I'm old but I'm not old enough to remember how Americans ever came up with the notion of piling a heap of cooked spaghetti on a plate and then dumping a quart of sauce on top of it. But there it is; the typical American way of serving “spaghetti.” I guess it goes back to the early days of the Italian diaspora when everything Italian was still considered mysterious and exotic. Nobody outside the Italian enclaves knew how to cook the stuff, so they just punted. And that's what they came up with.

Now, I can give a little leeway to home cooks because, as I've acknowledged, you can do whatever you want with your food at home. It's the so-called “Italian” restaurants that really gripe me. If you run a place called “Vincenzo's” or “Giuseppe's” or “Lorenzo's” or “Giovanni's” and you serve pasta this despicable way, you should be stripped of your Italian heritage and the final vowel in your last name and you should just call your place “Vincent's” or “Joe's” or “Larry's” or “John's Place.” Because what you're doing ain't Italian and your mamma didn't teach you that way.

And I hear it all the time from Italian restaurant owners: “But that's what my American customers expect!” And I know. I can feel your pain. I once took over running a little American diner for a friend. And he offered a “spaghetti special” on Fridays, which I immediately remade in the authentic Italian way. For the most part, it was a great success, with patrons gushing with praise for the improved quality. Many said it was better than the Italian place down the street. BUT.....and there's always a “butt”.....I had one disgruntled dude who complained that what I put on his plate looked like “leftovers” because everything was “all mixed together.” He demanded his pile of plain spaghetti topped with a quart of sauce. I tried to patiently explain why I fixed it the way I did, but he wasn't satisfied and I never saw him again. He probably went to the “Italian” place down the street.

Anyway, in real, authentic Italian cooking, you always finish the pasta in the sauce. You never, EVER pile plain pasta on a plate and cover it with sauce. And if you're eating at an “Italian” place that does that, I'm telling you that they are just pandering to the lowest common denominator. Don't let 'em do it! Send it back and tell 'em, “Non insultarmi, stupido! Cucinalo come farebbe tua mamma!” Well, don't say it like that or you'll probably get thrown out. But you get the idea. Don't accept mediocrity.

There's a good reason we cook it the way we do. When you take the pasta out of the water a minute or two before it reaches that perfect al dente stage and let it finish cooking for those last couple of minutes in that delicious, flavorful sauce, the flavors – i sapori – of the pasta and the sauce will marry and mingle in a way that is simply not possible to achieve by dumping them on a plate separately. The pasta has already released its starches and opened up to absorb the salt you've added to the water and now it's going to further accept all the nuances of that full, rich sauce. É semplicemente il migliore! It is the considered opinion of anybody with even a drop of Italian blood in their veins that there is nothing worse than a pile of bland, flavorless spaghetti sitting and cooling helplessly on a plate while somebody drowns it in some thin, unremarkable sauce. And yet, that is the typical American standard “spaghetti dinner” preparation and Italians will weep for you.

Yeah, so I'm a little dramatic.

The other key to serving pasta the authentic Italian way is to leave it the hell alone!

In the scheme of Italian dining, pasta is a course in and of itself! You don't put anything “in” or “with” pasta. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked, “Would you like some chicken in that pasta, sir?” No, I don't want any frickin' chicken in my pasta! Chicken belongs to the next course, the secondo. This is the primo course and it's fine just the way it is. If you get nothing else out of this rant, get this, please: There is NOTHING wrong with eating a plain, unadorned, unadulterated dish of pasta and sauce.

In the traditional Italian meal structure, pasta dishes are paired with sauces that complement and enhance the overall flavor of the dish. Each ingredient plays its part in achieving a balanced outcome. Throwing chunks of chicken in there – or any meat or fish, really – throws that perfect balance out of whack. Those meats are considered secondary complements to the pasta, hence the term secondo. You serve them by themselves, or maybe in conjunction with the contorno, or vegetable, course, after, but never mixed in with, the pasta course. That's why you'll never find something like chicken Alfredo on an authentic Italian menu. Well.....you'll never find anything Alfredo on an authentic Italian menu, but that's another story. No “chicken tortellini,” no “chicken carbonara.” And Olive Garden's “Tour of Italy” is a visit to a place that simply doesn't exist. “A trio of Chicken Parmigiana, Lasagna Classico, and Fettuccine Alfredo on one plate!” There's so much wrong with that picture that I scarcely know where to start.

Putting aside the actual non-existence of chicken parm, you'll never find a “side” of pasta on a plate next to anything. Pasta is pasta and chicken is chicken. They don't belong together on the same plate. Neither does steak or pork chops or salmon. You don't mix meat with pasta and you don't serve pasta “next to” meat. That doesn't mean that meat can't be an ingredient in a pasta dish, like the pancetta or guanciale in a carbonara, but you wouldn't just slap a hunk of ham on a plate of pasta. Same goes for beef, pork, or veal in a Bolognese or in a ragu served mixed with pasta. But you don't, for instance, put hunks of meat – lookin' at you, meatballs – on top of a plate of spaghetti. And, while you might find some broccoli florets perched on a plate next to your 8-ounce sirloin, you'll never see a “side” of spaghetti there. At least you won't in madre Italia.

Okay, pluck the chickens and warm up the tar. I'm ready for the onslaught of commentary about how Italians are nothing but stuffy, pedantic, ultra-purist, hyper-critical pettifoggers and how food is food and you can fix it any way you damn well please. É vero! And you can wear white after Labor Day, wear socks with your sandals, and drive twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, too. Ain't freedom grand? All I'm sayin' is that authenticity usually comes with rules and that Italian culinary customs have developed over many generations. And that maybe, in this ever-changing world in which we live, there are a few old traditions worth hanging on to.

A Fifty-Cent Surcharge On Eggs? Okay, How About Buttered Toast?

I'll Fork Over Extra For A Decent Slice

The world was shocked the other day by the announcement that Waffle House is going to be charging a fifty-cent per egg surcharge. Well, at least it was shocking in the part of the world that knows what a “Waffle House” is. That means my two eggs, scrambled, with bacon, hash browns (plain) and buttered toast is now gonna cost me an extra buck. Boh! (That's pretty much the Italian equivalent of “meh”.) Like it or not, (and I don't) it is what it is and there's little to gain by screaming about it.

You really want something to scream about, though? How about the aforementioned buttered toast? I mean, why in the hell can't I get a decent piece of buttered toast at a Waffle House? Or an IHOP? Or pretty much any other chain breakfast place? Buttered toast. Emphasis on the “buttered.” It's a simple enough preparation. It seems like something anybody could do. I, myself, have been doing it since around the age of five.

I Googled “buttered toast” and was rewarded with numerous results containing actual recipes for how to make buttered toast. Seriously. But the very first one pretty much summed up the process: “Evenly spread butter onto toasted bread using a butter knife or spreader.” Ah-HA! THERE'S the rub! It's those first two words, “evenly spread.”

See, when I make buttered toast at home, I by golly make buttered toast. That means that you can actually see the butter on the toast and it also means that said butter is “ evenly spread” from the top of the bread slice to bottom and from side to side and corner to corner. In short, the toast is completely, thoroughly, and unequivocally buttered.

Not so in your average breakfast emporium. In many of those establishments I have to bring out a magnifying glass to detect the little spot of butter they administer with an eyedropper to the center of the slice of toasted bread. And in a lot of places, it's not even real butter but rather some unholy chemical concoction euphemistically labeled as “buttery spread,” “butter-flavored spread,” or my favorite “Liquid Butter,” which is actually liquid and hydrogenated soybean oil with a trace of salt, soy lecithin, and natural and artificial flavor, with beta carotene added for color and with dimethylpolysiloxane thrown in as an anti-foaming agent.

Honestly, I can't remember the last time I asked for buttered toast that it didn't arrive on my plate with a vague yellow smear across the center of the bread that made it look as though Remy, the delightful little rat/chef from the Disney classic “Ratatouille,” had dipped his tail in butter and scampered quickly across the surface.

Actually, I really do know why restaurants serve sub-par buttered toast. I don't like the answer any more than I like the surcharge on eggs, but.....

Let's bring Remy back into the discussion. A good chef like Remy would know that the magic number for an even, thick coating of butter on a piece of toast is one-and-a-half tablespoons. That's equal to about three-quarters of an ounce.

But, being a canny and cost-conscious little guy, Remy would realize that, with sixteen ounces to a pound, he's getting twenty-one slices of toast per pound of butter. As I'm writing this today, a pound of salted butter at my favorite restaurant wholesaler is going for about $3.25 for the cheap stuff and about $4.25 for the better quality product. Let's split the difference at $3.75. Twenty-one slices of toast per pound of butter equals roughly eighteen cents worth of butter per slice of toast.

Now, the standard two pound (thirty-two ounce) loaf of white sandwich bread that most restaurants use contains about twenty-eight slices and wholesales for about $5.25. Roughly nineteen cents a slice. Nineteen cents worth of bread and about eighteen cents worth of butter equals around thirty-seven cents that Remy's got to shell out for every slice of toast he serves if he's preparing it thoroughly buttered with real butter. An “order” of toast is generally two slices, so about seventy-four cents for an order of well-buttered toast. If Remy has a hundred covers (restaurant-speak for “diners” or “customers”) a day for breakfast, he's spending $74 a day on toast. $518 a week. $2,072 a month. You get the idea.

Now, “Liquid Butter,” on the other hand, wholesales for about $11.50 a gallon. There's 128 ounces in a gallon and if Remy just dips and smears maybe a teaspoon of cheap butter substitute on the toast he serves, that's 1/6 of a fluid ounce or about a penny-and-a-half per slice of toast. Add the bread back in to the equation and Remy can prepare a slice of “buttered” toast in this manner for about twenty-one cents. Forty-two cents an order. Forty-two bucks per hundred covers, etc. Does it matter that it's a crappy excuse for buttered toast? Nah. Not when the bottom line is on the line.

And then there's the toast itself. Inconsistent, at best. My grandmother used to like her toast burned to the consistency of carbon. Don't ask me why. My mother, on the other hand, liked hers barely warmed. A little brown was okay, but don't overdo it. Most restaurants strive to hit the middle ground. But lately I've been getting a lot of toast that is charred black on one side and barely warmed on the other. Or it's not really “toasted” at all. Lacking an actual four or six-slice commercial toaster in the kitchen, the cooks are slapping the bread in a pan or on the flattop and “toasting” it that way, or they're putting it on a sheet tray and sticking it under a broiler for a minute or two. Yes, technically it's “toasted,” but it's not really toast.

Tell you what; if you're gonna jack up the price of eggs by half-a-buck to cover the increased cost, I'd be willing to fork over an extra quarter to have a real, honest-to-goodness slice of buttered toast on my plate next to those high-dollar eggs. Real toast. Real butter. Slathered all over.

But I, as usual, am naught but a voice crying in the wilderness. It ain't gonna happen. And since Waffle House, IHOP, et.al. would likely look askance at me for bringing in my own buttered toast, I suppose my breakfast fate is sealed.

Or toasted.

An Egg Cracker? Really?!

Sorry, But I've Got To “Counter” This Recommendation

It's been a slow afternoon, and as I was scrolling through some useless stuff on the Net I came across a piece on the best way to scramble eggs. Since I've only been doing it for over a half-century, I thought I'd take a look and see what modern innovations may have revolutionized the process. And, lo and behold, the first “need” the young author presented in her list of essentials (all available for purchase on Amazon and various other outlets, by the way) was an egg cracker.

No. Really, An egg cracker.

For only nine bucks, it's something I never knew I needed. Imagine, I've been struggling to cook scrambled eggs, both at home and in the professional kitchen, for decades and now I realize that I've only been making things harder on myself by not possessing an egg cracker. I feel so utterly inadequate now. I hereby apologize to all the people to whom I have presented obviously sub-par scrambles owing to my egregious lack of proper equipment.

Seriously, this little gadget looks like a spoon rest with a raised ridge in the middle of it. In fact, the author notes that you can use it as a spoon rest when you're not using it for egg prep. So it's a multi-tasker! Yay! “It can help you cleanly break shells into a straight line," she enthuses. "All you do is crack your egg against the center ridge, then pour the whites and yolk into a bowl.”

I already have a similar device in my kitchen: it's called a countertop.

Now, I don't have one of these things in my hand, but looking at the picture it seems to me that the little ridge in the center would have the same effect as the edge of a bowl in that it would not necessarily “cleanly break” the shell. The preferred better and safer method of egg cracking is to give the egg a firm tap on a flat surface – like a countertop. The egg-sperts – see what I did there? – say this method is far less likely to drive little shards of shell and any possibly contaminating bacteria into the interior of the egg.

Every culinary school graduate I know uses a flat surface for breaking eggs rather than striking them against a sharp corner or the edge of a bowl. Even though you see the occasional TV chef employing that practice, I promise you it's not what they were taught in school. I've even run across a few people – very few – who break their eggs by smacking them together. Okay, fine. But what if you're only cracking one egg?

My mother and my grandmother and probably their grandmothers, too, cracked eggs on the edge of a bowl. It's intuitive and it's how most home cooks roll. I don't know when the “better,” “safer” method was discovered/developed/decided upon among professional cooks, but it's the one they teach now and it's the only one I use/teach as well.

Once you crack the shell, techniques for the messy part - breaking the egg open the rest of the way – vary according to the preference and skill level of the cook.

I can open an egg one-handed. It's not really hard. It just takes a little practice. You hold the egg in your hand with your thumb placed along one long side of the egg and your fore and middle fingers on the other. Bring your pinky and ring finger to the bottom side and press the bottom of the egg into your palm. Crack the egg against a flat surface, then, in a slight twisting motion, use your thumb and forefinger to lift the top half while using your ring finger and pinky to pull down on the bottom half. If you've cracked the egg cleanly, it should separate cleanly and everything will come out without any shell fragments. 

I seldom do it this way, unless I'm trying to be showy or something. Most of the time, I do it the way everybody else does: after cracking the shell on a flat surface, you lightly press the tips of your thumbs into the crack until the egg's keratinous outer and inner membranes break. Then you just gently pull the shell apart and the white and yolk parts will slide out into your waiting bowl, hopefully intact. And, by the way, while not absolutely necessary, it's always a good idea to crack eggs into a separate bowl before mixing them together for your scramble or omelet or cake batter or whatever. Reason being, if you get a bad egg – which can sometimes happen – you can isolate it before it mixes in with other eggs and ruins the whole works. And it's easier to fish a stray bit of shell out of one egg than it is to fish it out of two or three or more.

So, there you have Egg Cracking 101. And it didn't cost you a penny.

The advocate of the nine-dollar egg cracker, who identifies herself as a “Senior Editor, Home & Garden” goes on to recommend a wide variety of bowls, whisks, spatulas, pans, holders, cookers, containers, add-in ingredients, and more, all of which are only a click away throughout her article. Fine. Everybody has got to make a buck. But if you've got a bowl, a balloon whisk, a silicone spatula or a wooden spoon, and a non-stick pan, you've pretty much got everything you need. The most essential thing you'll require to make outstanding scrambled eggs is practice and you can't buy that online.

You can buy an egg cracker, though. But, really, don't.