Top 10 Pasta Tips For Budding Italian Cooks

1. Shape up
Our first pasta tip is about understanding which pasta shapes to use with which pasta sauces and ingredients.

Long pasta shapes work best with seafood pasta recipes - such as those involving muscles, prawns and clams. This is because seafood dishes tend to be quite oily, and this oil helps the long pasta move around (so you can easily swirl it onto your fork!).

Meat and cheese pasta sauces meanwhile are better suited to small shapes; with their large, uneven surface areas, pastas like rigatoni, conchiglie (shells), penne and fusilli can physically hold more of that dribbly sauce - meaning fewer mishaps between dish and mouth.

The traditional exception to these pasta tips is, of course, spaghetti bolognese. My advice? Wear a napkin!

2. In the mix

Don't mix different pasta shapes in the same dish, because according to my Neapolitan wife this is nothing less than a sin. (Unless that is you're buying a packet of special pre-mixed shapes from Naples, in the south of Italy, to make pasta fagioli (bean pasta). Better get buying that plane ticket then!)

3. The perfect portion

100g or 3.5oz of pasta is the standard Italian serving for a one-person pasta meal. (If pasta is only the first course however - called 'primo piatto' in Italian - this amount will 50 to 80 grams.)

These weights may seem on the low side, but remember that pasta is full of carbohydrates and has a what you might call a 'fullness delay' of 10-20 minutes... meaning it takes your body this long after you stop eating to realise how full you are.

4. Water talk

When boiling pasta, use lots of water and don't forget the salt.

Fill your large pan with 1 quart/950ml of water for each 100g serving of pasta. Bring this to the boil, throw in the pasta, and when boiling again add the salt (one tablespoon, or a little less, for every 100g of pasta).

5. Wooden top

A little-known pasta tip, but a goodie: to stop your pan of pasta from boiling over you can just place a wooden spoon across the top. Bizarrely, this works... genius!

6. Overcooking = evil

Do not overcook pasta!

Packet pasta should be served 'al dente' (literally 'firm to the tooth'). To test if your packet pasta is ready, take a piece out of the pan and break it. If it's white inside, it's not ready.

Fresh pasta meanwhile is already soft, so usually needs between 3 and 5 minutes to cook (depending upon the type).

7. Sweet not sour

Does your bubbling tomato sauce taste sour? Pop in half a teaspoon of sugar. Its sweetness will counteract the natural acidity of the toms.

8. Treat basil nice

It's arguably the most-used herb in Italian cooking, so this pasta tip applies to numerous recipes: don't chop basil with a knife.

Horizontal 'tearing' (with your fingers) is better, as it doesn't turn the leaves to complete mush like downward slicing does.

9. Nothing on the side

Whilst Italians do eat pasta with bread (try not to think about all the carbs!), they never eat it alongside other foods such as salad. In Italy, pasta is 'il pasto' - the meal (or 'la portata' - the course).

10. Good to grate?

Do not grate cheese, parmesan or any other type of cheese, onto fish or seafood pasta meals.

This is simply not done in Italy, so if you ask for parmesan with a fish dish in an Italian restaurant you'll get very strange looks (just like you would if ordering a cappuccino, a breakfast drink, after 11am!).

And finally, for the wine...

When it comes to the wine to drink with your pasta (and food in general really), the basic rule is this: white wine for seafood and fish, and red for meat dishes.



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