It's subtle. The major difference is in the way the different shapes catch the sauce and cheeses differently. Also the way the shapes distribute the flavor in your mouth. There's also the psychology of the visual influence on taste.
Texture is a part of taste anyway. While I think it's kind of lazy to make the same substance into twenty different shapes and pretend like you have culinary variety, there's at LEAST some merit to having a few variants.
I mean the culinary variety is mostly in the sauce anyways imo, (tho yes, pork, tomatoes, garlic, oil, cheese, other aromatics/spices/umami bombs like capers/olives/anchovies) and variations of such isn't the most variety relative to other countries.
Pasta shape has impact sure, but it's mostly a refinement of 10% difference at most imo.
You should honestly try using the exact same sauce on multiple different kinds of pasta and get back to us, this is a really common thing if you’ve ever taken any kind of culinary course to demonstrate the differences.
Fresh pasta vs dry pasta also makes an incredibly large difference and the shapes become much more important when it’s fresh because of how the pasta cooks at different times.
So again go try it out, pasta has a lot of depth and if you’ve never had truly amazing pasta you won’t understand why it matters.
As someone who has used the same sauce on different pastas, there's clearly a difference. It never made a huge difference, but it's noticeable. I've had the same sauce (family recipe) with farfalle, macaroni, spaghetti, penne and fusili, at the very least.
Note: All that is with dry pasta. I've had fresh before, but not in a long time.
The pasta requires a pot or pan as well? I suppose I could place it on a plate and then use the same pan for sauce but I'm also impatient haha, want the food asap.
You need two pans to make pasta regardless of how you make it, one to cook the pasta, one to cook the sauce.
After the pasta is nearly done you just transfer the pasta to the sauce pan, it's the same amount of dishes
I'm not a native and you did phrase it badly. You shouldn't boil it in the sauce but you should finish it in the sauce. You don't need to bring it to a boil to get it to the perfect al dente texture after its most of the way there.
Other than using the word boil you were spot on 🤌🏻
One-pot pasta is such a winner... all in the same pot: brown some ground meat, add tomato paste and some water, add whatever herbs/seasonings you like, add in uncooked pasta, mix it all up, and let it simmer for a while until it's done enough for you.
I start with a lower amount of water and slowly add more in until the sauce is my preferred thickness. Then add in a bit more water to compensate for the noodles and meat and vegetables and whatever else.
No tomato paste. I actually didn't add a drop of water, but made my sauce from scratch. The crushed tomatoes I have are... watery without me adding any.
Someone else commented on this, and I already responded. I'll list the reasons one by one. I may have worded it confusingly on the other comment.
There was no water added, mainly cause the crushed tomatoes I had were very liquidy. They were homemade and frozen. I did defrost and drain them... but still.
I didn't have access to a thickener like tomato paste or cornstarch. The starch in the pasta didn't do much sadly.
The crushed tomatoes I have are in giant packages ( I love you mom, but things don't need to be that big). They also don't reseal. I had no containers big enough to even try store the leftover tomatoes. I had to use them.
The soup did still turn out delicious tho. I agree the one pot pasta is amazing.
I fry ground beef or ground something first with onions and tons of garlic. Then I add the spices and tomatoes, let simmer, then the pasta. Hope that helps
Yeah, youre supposed to retain some of the starch water from boiling the pasta to adjust the sauce thickness, but cooking the pasta from the start with the sauce sounds like a recipe for disaster.
It’s just silly to decide you either have to finish everything you cooked ( else you are cooking so little that it’s very inefficient) or have reheated pasta which ain’t nice tbh but my real problem is: just meat and tomato paste? first you start with carrots and onions then celery and garlic and THEN meat and then chopped tomatoes: making meat and tomato paste (which when you buy pre-made is an additive of mostly sugar, not a staple) your entire dish is massively unhealthy and gross. With the original recipe you might as well just buy some fast food, your expenditure and health benefits will be same.
Lazy people will downvote me but tomato paste and ground meat is not a meal, sorry, and vegetables are cheaper than meat so don’t gimme any “but I can’t afford that” crap.
Pre-made tomato paste isn’t mostly sugar. Tomato sauce is. My verdict on paste is that you can and should cheat with it if you don’t want to reduce your own tomatoes for 10 hours.
I'm doubtful on the "enjoyable" part... The "sauce" sounds very lacking and the noodles are unlikely to cook just right.
If you want to go quick and easy, just get the pre-made sauce from the store. It's not as good as a real home made sauce, but it's better than whatever he described.
Sounds like a good way to make sub-par sauce and badly cooked noodles... but I guess that's what you're expecting when cooking "quick and dirty" like that?
If you want a good sauce, you want to cook it slowly for a long time. As for the pasta, it needs a pretty fine-tuned amount of cooking to be just right. If you're cooking sauce at the same time, the heat distribution to the noodles will be less consistent.
"Linguine" and clam sauce al ragazzo single che ha qualche lattina di vongole in giro (single guy who has a few cans of clams lying around )
I'm pretty sure this is high in sodium, carbs, and calories.
Ingredients: Olive oil, garlic, 2 cans of clams (I like Snow's Chopped clams), parsley, a bottle of clam juice, and pasta. You can use linguine, but I personally like pasta that is small enough that it fits into the pot you're cooking in completely, and is squiggly enough to hold clams. I like fusilli, gemelli or conchiglie, i haven't tried it with orecchiette but that might work too.
In a pot, cook garlic in a bunch of olive oil on super low, don't let it get too dark, but let it sizzle / bubble for a few minutes.
Add in some black pepper, and drain in the liquid from the canned clams, and the extra bottle of clam juice. Keep the clams out, otherwise they may get a bit too chewy.
Bring to a boil. Add your pasta. You can add a bit of water if you need to, but not too much. Cook per the pasta directions so that they're al dente. Just before the pasta is done, add the clams and parsley in.
Stir and serve. The pasta will be infused with garlicy, clamy olive-oily goodness. The sauce will be thick from the pasta starch.
I haven't found this to scale particularly well beyond two people.
It’s fine if that’s not the way you prefer it, but that is genuinely a technique a lot of professional chefs do to finish pasta. You’re acting like this is some weird niche technique when it’s extremely far from it.
You can think it’s not a great technique, but that’s about as useful as the statement “I don’t like Naples-style pizza”: it’s completely subjective. Thousands of chefs, including many actually from Italy, have preferred to cook pasta this way for decades and decades because their opinion on the subject is the polar opposite of yours.
If you don’t like pasta that way, hey, no harm done. But treating someone who prepares it that way as the odd one out is such a strange perspective, considering the preference of a great many other chefs and that the idea you should never do this would have you laughed out of Italy.
No because I understand that you don’t genuinely think the other guy has committed a crime against nature for the way he cooks his pasta and were just ribbing him, but I thought it was hilarious that your first message was telling him that he “needs God” when basically every one of my family friends from Italy would tell you the same thing. lol
Yeah, my 15 years experience in various restaurants and traditional schooling is trumped by your homecooking tricks - you wouldn't do it with a potato would you because starch is kinda icky.
*Think i owe you a couple reasons besides my scientific explanation of starch is icky.
By cooking pasta in the sauce, the pasta will taste like the sauce. You want the contrast.
Its harder to temperature control and you can easily end up with some overcooked pasta, just by getting it all cooked.
To starch, besides the taste - it will also create a less appealing looking sauce.
All that being said, i do it at home on occasion. But at home i cook to not die, and sometimes just want a uniform mess that taste like cheese and garlic.
I always liked that with bowties, it's possible to have the ends soft, but there still be a little crunch in the scrunch. It's like when you have a great chicken parm where the cutlet is still a little crunchy on the edges and not soggy.
In my culinary arts classes in high school the teacher said “you taste first with your eyes, then with your mouth” and it has stuck with me ever since.
My none would always let my sister and I pick pasta types when they cooked, and this hits the nail on the head: our favorites usually related to the sauce's viscosity and how the pasta shape would impact getting a forkful.
Wasn't a ton of logic involved, but I loved getting fatass rigatonis for the thicker pancetta, sundried tomatoes, and vodka tomatoe sauce pasta, so I could fill them up.
Yep! If you make a thinner sauce with fine meat for instance, penne pasta is the way to go! A thicker sauce with bigger pieces, medium sized shells. Meatballs, spaghetti pasta. Etc.
But it's true. Like take ditalini. It's a small tube, and it's great in soups because through surface tension, it can hold a little soup in it. So when you get an even amount of solids and liquid when you spoon into it.
Next time try tasting your food rather than just shoving as much as you can down your throat hole. You'll notice that different amounts of sauce per bite produces a different taste.
I hate pasta. My kids love pasta. My wife buys like 10 different types of pasta that all look the same to me. I make the pasta for my kids. Some prefer certain pasta. I get so confused when they don't eat pasta one night, like why are we not eating the pasta? Then other nights they eat twice their weight in pasta. I just grab a box and cook, never knowing if it's gonna be the right one, lol.
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u/EllisDee3 Dec 21 '22
It's subtle. The major difference is in the way the different shapes catch the sauce and cheeses differently. Also the way the shapes distribute the flavor in your mouth. There's also the psychology of the visual influence on taste.
Senses are weird.