Chef says there's 'secret code' that explains why certain pastas have holes in them
Diving into a scrumptious bowl of pasta is the ultimate comfort when you're famished and craving something hearty. It's an affordable and tasty dish that also happens to be perfect for leftovers. While classics like Bolognese and carbonara are go-to favourites, pasta's versatility means you can pair it with pretty much anything. Yet, faced with supermarket aisles brimming with a dizzying array of pasta shapes, making a choice can be overwhelming.
Some may habitually reach for the same pasta shape, but a culinary expert has shed light on why there's such a vast selection. To the surprise of many, each pasta shape serves a distinct purpose.
New Zealand-born chef Andy, who goes by Andy Cooks on social media and has honed his skills in some of the finest eateries globally, including those in London, recently imparted his wisdom about pasta.
Andy revealed: "Have you ever wondered why there are so many pasta shapes? Well, it's not random. The Italians have basically invented a secret code where every shape is matched to a specific sauce."
Let's delve into the pasta shapes you ought to know....
Thin and long pasta
Andy advises that spaghetti and angel hair pasta are ideally suited to lighter sauces. They blend seamlessly with combinations like garlic and olive oil or lemon and butter sauce.
"Or even Cacio e Pepe," Andy added.
The seasoned chef pointed out that these sauces cling to the pasta strands uniformly. He observed: "If you have a heavy meat sauce on a pasta like this, you're going to watch all that meat just fall straight off."
Flat and wide pasta
This pasta category includes varieties such as fettucine, pappardelle, and tagliatelle. Andy suggests that these pasta shapes are perfectly suited for meaty sauces, creamy concoctions, and pestos.
He clarified: "All that extra surface area grips all the flavour. And generally speaking, the heavier the sauce, the wider the noodle."
Twisted and tubular pasta
Consider pasta forms like fusilli, penne, and rigatoni. The latter two boast a convenient hole, ideal for trapping extra flavour.
Andy remarked: "Now, these pastas, they're sauce magnets. The twists are great with the lighter sauces, and these tubes - they love the thick stuff."
Final thoughts
Matching the pasta shape with the appropriate sauce can truly elevate your culinary creations.
Andy concluded: "Next time you're in the shop and you need to buy some pasta, think about what sauce you're having with it and what pasta you should match."
The guidance was met with enthusiasm in the comments section, where people shared their reactions.
One individual commented: "This genuinely changes my life as somebody beginning their cooking journey."
Another stated: "I love pasta, and this has encouraged me to explore more shapes...apart from spaghetti."
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Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
‘The English always ruin our recipes': The pasta dish that made Italy irate
Pasta, pepper, pecorino. And… butter? Cacio e pepe, the creamy pasta dish, is traditionally composed of just three ingredients. But not according to Good Food, formerly owned by the BBC, which recently published a recipe for the traditional Roman favourite that snuck in a fourth. The website, which says the pasta dish makes for an 'easy, speedy lunch', calls for spaghetti (or, controversially, the thicker pasta bucatini), ground black pepper, pecorino and butter. It even adds insult to injury by suggesting that the pecorino could be substituted with plain old parmesan (many pasta purists would argue it cannot). A small change, perhaps, but one that has escalated into a full-blown crisis leading to a complaint being lodged at the British embassy, outraged headlines splashed over local papers and Roman chefs up in arms at the bastardisation of a beloved dish. Adding butter to cacio e pepe, they argue, is heresy – as is suggesting that a delicate, surprisingly complicated recipe is both 'easy' and 'speedy'. The creaminess of the sauce must come from the combination of starchy pasta water and pecorino cheese alone. They join a long line of Italians complaining about how the British – and others – treat their cuisine, from mild misdemeanours, like putting cheese on seafood pasta, to the cardinal sin of cream in a carbonara. Paolo Catarinozzi, owner of Zi Umberto, a restaurant specialising in classic Roman dishes in the heart of the capital's Trastevere district, pulls no punches. He describes the Good Food recipe, which appears to have been online for several months but has only now triggered a dispute, as 'disgusting'. 'It is another dish altogether,' he says. 'It is offensive. The English always ruin our recipes, because they try to adapt Italian recipes to please their customers, instead of producing dishes as they should be made.' Catarinozzi runs his restaurant – which serves cacio e pepe as it ought to be served, at least according to his clientele – with his daughter Alice. 'For us it is not just about the food,' she says. 'These are recipes [perfected] by our grandparents – it is about respecting what they gave us, protecting their memories.' Others have gone further still with their criticism. Coldiretti, Italy 's largest farmers' organisation, released a statement that called distorted recipes such as the Good Food's cacio e pepe a 'gastronomic 'gallery of horrors''. Another case is 'spaghetti bolognese, a dish that is practically unknown in traditional Italian cuisine but very popular abroad, especially in the United Kingdom', it continued. Irate Italophiles have always complained about the British take on Italian classics, but not until now has anyone attempted to escalate it to a diplomatic crisis. One disgruntled association of restaurateurs in the Italian capital is so het up about the addition of butter to the Good Food recipe that it has lodged a complaint with the British embassy in Rome. Claudio Pica, president of the Rome branch of the restaurant association Fiepet-Confesercenti, said the recipe is akin to 'us coming to Britain and demanding the finest double malt whisky mixed with lemonade' in a letter addressed to Good Food and diplomats in the capital. The embassy declined to comment when contacted by The Telegraph. Picking up on the tensions, one headline in an Italian newspaper read, 'Butter and parmesan in… cacio e pepe! Stunned! The British embassy informed!' Another, the Rome-based Il Messaggero, quipped: 'Paraphrasing the famous British anthem 'God save the king', Rome restaurateurs are now saying: 'God save the cacio e pepe.'' But is this a valiant battle to protect the heart of Italian cuisine, or just a storm in a saucepan? As Francesco Mazzei, one of the leading Italian chefs in the UK, argues, adding butter is a shortcut, perhaps even a cop-out. 'NO butter,' he says, emphatically. 'Let's put it this way. It's easy to make a cacio e pepe with butter. It's extremely difficult to make a cacio e pepe with no butter.' Mazzei argues that while the recipe might appear to be simple, 'simplicity is also sophistication. You need to know how to do it. It's all about skills and years and years and years of technique.' Not everybody agrees. Conor Gadd, chef-owner at Trullo, a leading Italian restaurant in north London, is 'unapologetic' about his use of butter in his restaurant's version of the dish. He does, however, describe developing his take on the classic as the 'bane of my life'. 'Adding butter isn't traditional, and Italians are the very essence of traditionalism,' says Gadd. 'We played around with it for years, adding pecorino, parmesan, we used egg yolk sometimes, and eventually, we said, 'what are we doing here?' I'm not Italian. I don't have to stick to how my mother taught me to do things.' 'Italian cooking is very simple, very pure, with an innate trust in the quality of ingredients,' he continues. That's all well and good, but 'the reason we would add butter is to adapt it to the British palette'. Quite simply, with a knob of butter, the pasta just tastes better. And, he adds, 'on a cold night in north London, I think people just appreciate a bit of butter'. Perhaps this is exactly why the Good Food concoction does appear to have pleased British home cooks – creamier, potentially tastier, and better suited to our climes. One suspiciously well-placed commenter on the website's recipe page posted: 'I can't believe adding a [little] butter turned this from a boring traditional recipe into something I actually like eating. This is one of those examples where a small update makes all the difference!' Good Food has responded to the uproar by removing a line from the recipe that suggested it includes 'four simple ingredients – spaghetti, pepper, parmesan and butter'. The company said via a spokesman that it has 'been in touch with the Fiepet-Confesercenti association to explain that our recipe is designed to be easy to use for home cooks using readily available ingredients in the UK'. 'With that in mind, we have edited the copy at the start of the recipe to make this clear and we have invited the Roman restaurant association to supply us with an authentic Italian version that we would love to upload and credit to them,' the spokesman added. Some adaptations are indeed necessitated by what's available (or not) on British supermarket shelves, which are not known to be heaving with the finest pecorino and perfectly cured guanciale. However, Britons do have a long and illustrious history of butchering the beloved Italian classics. There was a similar outcry when Mary Berry published a bolognese recipe that included double cream and white wine. Nigella Lawson also found herself in hot water when she had the audacity to put nutmeg and double cream in her carbonara; despite the fact that she adds double cream to nearly everything, she was accused of heralding the 'death of Italian cuisine'. And let's not forget the more recent carbonara crisis, when The New York Times suggested that tomatoes belong in the creamy, silky spaghetti dish. 'Tomatoes are not traditional in carbonara, but they lend a bright tang to the dish,' a piece published by NYT Cooking in 2021 read. Backlash was immediate, and fierce, with some critics arguing the recipe 'should be illegal'. And then there are the Frankensteinian horrors we – or America – have created ourselves: spaghetti and meatballs, ham and pineapple on pizza, and the atrocity that is Heinz tinned carbonara. However, the truth is that many of the recipes heralded as Italian classics have a history – and origin – that is fiercely contested. Luca Cesari, a leading food historian has suggested that according to the first carbonara recipe, unearthed from 1954, the dish should be made with pancetta (bacon) rather than the guanciale (pork jowl) that any self-respecting Italian would insist upon. He received death threats. Alberto Grandi, an Italian academic and pasta myth-buster, has gone so far as to suggest that many of the Italian classics, from pizza to panettone, are either relatively recent inventions or – shock horror – not even Italian recipes at all. He has even claimed that carbonara was an American invention. So, yes, buttery cacio e pepe may be an aberration, or at the very least a shameless adaptation. But if the Italians are at it too, is that really such a crime?
The Guardian
4 days ago
- The Guardian
Inclusion of butter in UK recipe for cacio e pepe draws outrage from Italian media
One of the UK's most popular food websites has cooked up a storm in Italy after allegedly botching a recipe for the traditional Roman pasta dish, cacio e pepe, drawing diplomatic representations from the main trade association for Italian restaurateurs. A recipe on Good Food, formerly owned by the BBC, which continues to licence the web address – described cacio e pepe, a culinary institution in the Italian capital, as a 'store cupboard favourite' that could easily be whipped up for 'a speedy lunch' using 'four simple ingredients – spaghetti, pepper, parmesan and butter'. The notion that making cacio e pepe is easy was bad enough, but the presence of parmesan cheese and butter has been deemed a cardinal sin. Traditional cacio e pepe contains three ingredients: pasta (usually tonnarelli, a type of spaghetti), pecorino Romano cheese and black pepper. Such is the fury, Fiepet Confesercenti, an association that represents restaurants in Italy, said it would demand a correction from the website in order to 'safeguard this iconic dish'. Furthermore, it has taken up the issue with the British embassy in Rome. The recipe appears to have been on the site for about three months, but despite a couple of readers calling out the butter blunder, it only now seems to have caught the attention of Fiepet Confesercenti, which was also offended by the brief preparation video that runs alongside it showing a chunk of butter being put into a pan. Claudio Pica, the president of the Rome unit for Fiepet Confesercenti, said the association was 'astonished' to see the recipe on such a popular and esteemed food site, adding that letters have been sent to Immediate Media, the site's owner, and the British ambassador to Rome, Edward Llewellyn. 'This iconic dish, traditionally from Rome and the Lazio region, has been a staple of Italian cuisine for years, so much so it has been replicated even beyond Italy's borders,' he added. 'We regret to contradict the historic and authoritative British media, but the original recipe for cacio e pepe excludes parmesan and butter. There are not four ingredients, but three: pasta, pepper and pecorino.' Pica admitted that while some chefs may dabble with the recipe, the main concern is that the website has misled readers by presenting the dish as the original. The Guardian has asked Immediate Media for comment. Italian newspapers have had a field day over the controversy, with the Rome-based Il Messaggero writing: 'Paraphrasing the famous British anthem 'God save the king', Rome restaurateurs are now saying: 'God save the cacio e pepe'.' The Guardian's 2021 recipe for the dish by the food writer Felicity Cloake comprises just pasta, pepper and pecorino. It is not the first time the foreign media has become embroiled in an Italian food row. In 2021, the New York Times published a tinkered-with recipe for another classic Roman pasta dish, carbonara, which included tomatoes. While the description of the recipe, called 'smoky tomato carbonara' and created by Kay Chun, did warn readers that it was not the original, Coldiretti, the Italian farmers' association, lashed out, saying the alteration was 'the tip of the iceberg in the falsification of traditional Italian dishes'. Given that Chun's recipe was again published in 2023, it appears the newspaper was unperturbed by the indignation. Italians often mock foreigners for their interpretation of an Italian recipe, especially pineapple on pizza or mixing pasta with chicken. The New York Times also provoked outrage in the UK in 2018 after publishing a recipe in which it described the yorkshire pudding, a roast dinner staple, as a 'large, fluffy pancake' that was excellent for 'breakfast, brunch, lunch and dessert any time of the year'.
Times
4 days ago
- Times
Italian chefs accuse Good Food of bastardising cacio e pepe recipe
It is one of the simplest Italian pasta dishes, combining black pepper and sharp pecorino cheese, but restaurateurs in Rome have accused Britain's leading recipe brand of bastardising cacio e pepe. In a letter to Good Food and the British embassy in Rome, chefs in the Italian capital complained about the addition of butter and parmesan cheese to a recipe on the Good Food website. 'That's like us coming to Britain and demanding the finest double malt whisky mixed with lemonade,' said Claudio Pica, author of the letter and president of the Rome branch of the restaurant association Fiepet-Confesercenti. 'We demand the recipe, as published, is changed at once,' he said. Cacio e pepe is thought to have been created by shepherds in the hills above Rome. Needing to travel for days with food in their packs, they conjured the dish out of hard, long-lasting, Roman pecorino sheep's cheese, a handful of peppercorns and pasta.
