food

Pasta: Favourite Italian Food

What is Italian pasta?

What is Italian pasta: a dish or type of pasta? Actually, both variants are right. Italian pasta is an Italian traditional dish consisting of 2 main essential components: any pasta and sauce.

Italian pasta can be of different kinds – dry pasta or Pasta secca and raw pasta or Pasta fresca. Also, there distinguished between a long paste or Lunga and a short paste or Corta.

Pasta and macaroni, what’s the difference?

Italians call our pasta but they are different. In Italy and some other countries, the term “pasta” is used to designate any pasta. This word comes from the Italian language and means “dough.” Actually, the word pasta is just a kind of pasta, namely dry dough tubes: thin and wide, of different lengths.

The composition of pasta is a little different from the usual pasta. Italian dry pasta is made from durum wheat and water. Because of this, it is easily digested, improves digestion and metabolism as it contains fiber, complex carbohydrates and other beneficial substances. This product does not contribute to weight increase because it does not contain fast carbohydrates.pasta

The paste may be solid or so-called fresh, consisting of flour of soft sorts with the addition of eggs. Fresh pasta is not dried, but boiled immediately, has a delicate flavor.

Pasta is used as a separate dish. As a supplement to it, various sauces including cheese are used. Pasta is used as a regular side dish. There is an incredible amount of recipes. In Italy itself, there are only more than 500 culinary masterpieces from this flour product. Each recipe has a specific approach and special ingredients for cooking, but in different regions of Italy, the same pasta recipes may vary in taste.

Kinds of Italian Pasta

There are 2 types of pasta: dry and fresh.

Dry pasta is dried products for a long-term storage. This type of paste is made only from durum wheat and water. All major manufacturers adhere to this requirement. A dry paste can be made also from soft wheat sorts with the addition of eggs. The unusual taste of products can be determined by secret components, as well as the process of their pressing and method of drying. To hold the sauce, most tubular products have grooves created during the pressing of dough. First, the dough is pressed through the nozzle. After pressing and cutting, the paste is dried in special ovens at a certain temperature. The best taste has pasta cooked in a classic Italian way. Unfortunately, industrial drying often occurs at very high temperatures reducing production time. If you dry the paste according to the traditional recipe, then this process will take about 50 hours. Well, at the end of the preparation, dry pasta is packed in branded packaging.

Use fresh pasta on the day of production, so that it does not lose its taste. Fresh pasta requires more attention.

What pasta is better? In fact, this is a matter of taste. They are both tasty, just used in different situations. Every person may choose yourself what he likes the most.

Forms of Italian pasta

Today, there is an amazing variety of different forms of pasta on the market. They number more than 500 types. Pasta manufacturers can prompt a new form for any significant event in the world.

The very first pasta recipe

Surprisingly, the very first documented recipes of Italian pasta were recorded, which indicated that this product was boiled in water with the addition of almond milk and then filled with a special sweet root sauce. So the very first pasta recipe was actually a dessert.

One of the first traditional pasta recipes was published in the book “De arte Coquinaria per vermicelli e macaroni siciliani” by chef Martin Corno in 1000. In the city of Pontedassio, there is a document in which the “macaroni” dish is first indicated, which is a modern macaroni with a sauce. Spaghetti got its name relatively recently thanks to Antonio Viviani, who so named them in 1842 because of its similarity with the string (from Italian twine sounds like Spago).