Making Pasta Dishes

To the home cook there is nothing so accessible yet so intimidating as making pasta. Usually the more ingredients in a recipe, the more complicated the dish. This is not always so when it comes to homemade pasta recipe. Sometimes that long list of ingredients means a forgiving sauce that is perfect for an inexperienced cook. Occasionally, pasta recipes that seem so simple and straightforward can create unforeseen difficulties.

When it comes to Italian pasta recipes, the same recipe will taste different from each cook. If you make Bolognese a couple of times, it will begin to take on “your” flavor. The wine you prefer, the amount pepper you add; you begin to make the recipe yours.

The point of all this is to explore fresh pasta recipes and the best ways of cooking pasta. It is also to demonstrate that with a little know how and patience you can make any pasta recipe into an easy pasta recipe.

Making Pasta and Cooking Delicious  Successfully

There are some tried and true rules that, when followed, will help to insure success when cooking pasta. The first rule, don’t over cook the pasta. Fresh pasta takes mere minutes to cook. Dried pasta cooking times will vary and the best way to tell if pasta is done is to taste it. That’s right, there is no magic number of minutes that insure the pasta is cooked perfectly. You don’t need to throw the pasta at anything to make sure it’s done. As a matter of fact, all throwing pasta at a wall will get you is a mess. Everyone has read a recipe that calls for pasta cooked “al dente”. But what does that mean? Basically it means that the pasta should feel firm when you bite down on it. The pasta that comes in canned soup? mush! Pasta should never be that soft. On the other side of that coin, if you have to put effort into chewing and your pasta is not easily masticated; it’s underdone. Second, and there exceptions to this, the best way to sauce your pasta is to add whatever style of noodle you are cooking to the pan of sauce. Add a small amount of the cooking water and allow the pasta the pasta a few seconds to simmer in the pan and really absorb the sauce into the noodles. And last, but not least, do not over sauce the pasta. The sauce should just coat the pasta, not drown it.

There are a few more things to keep in mind when making pasta - a fresh pasta recipe. The type of noodle should coordinate with the type of sauce. Sturdier noodles and noodles that are tubes or thick shapes with ridges hold up well against the heartier, chunky sauces. While thinner, more delicate noodles, work better with thinner cream sauces.