The beauty about pasta is it comes in so many shapes and sizes and matching them with different sauces, toppings and fillings makes it a dish where the possibilities are endless!
It does freak me out though how people can actually ruin such a simple and amazing ingredient!
My rules for non ruined pasta are easy:
- Boil in lots of salted water! Duh!
- Don’t rinse it under the tap! (Unless your going to leave it for hours! Which you shouldn’t anyway!)
- If for some reason you will cook the pasta and leave it a while, then cook it a little less, then after you strain it, rinse it quickly in cold water to stop carry-over cooking. Reserve all the cooking liquid. When you are ready to serve, bring the reserved cooking water to the boil, and add your pasta back in. It shouldn’t stay in the boiling water for more than a minute or two since you’re just reheating it.
- Add your pasta to your sauce while it’s hot immediately after you strain it! (If you’re making a lasagne give it a min to cool but keep it covered so it doesn’t dry out)
- Always always keep some of the cooking water! It’s starchy and is great to use to adjust the thickness of your sauce & helps the sauce cling better to your pasta.
- Oh and of course never over cook it! Time it! Usually it cooks aldente between 5 to 10 min based on the type.
So now we’ve covered the basics, here’s one of my fav pasta dishes.
I call it semi carbonara since it has a little cream and no bacon. And beef bacon, at least what we have here, is more akin to shoe leather than bacon!
My substitute of choice is basterma 🙂 A middle eastern (armenian???) preserved lean meat, it’s salted then covered in a beautiful spice paste and hung to dry.
The paste hardens into a rind while the meat stays beautifully tender.
Just remove the rind before using it.
Adds good flavor, usually sliced wafer thin and can be crisped up if you want to beautifully.
Hope you enjoy!
Fettuccine Semi Carbonara with Basterma
Cheers!
Riham's Messy Kitchen! 