Pasta

Semolina is the grind of durum wheat—the wheat that makes the best dry pasta. Here, mixed one-to-one with all-purpose flour, it makes a fresh pasta that is nutty and resilient to the bite.

I love buckwheat for the earthy, gritty character it brings to many dishes. Flour made from the buckwheat seed (it’s not a relative of wheat) is used in Japanese soba noodles and is traditional in Italian pasta too. In the Valtellina they make a dish called pizzoccheri, buckwheat pappardelle dressed with cabbage and bacon and Fontina.

Some of the first pastas in Italy, made by the Etruscans and later the Romans, were made out of barley and chickpea flour. When wheat came on the scene, it was milled as whole wheat and used for pasta. We find 100-percent whole wheat a bit dense and hard to digest these days, so I use equal proportions of white and whole wheat here to make a light, fast-cooking pasta with a distinctive taste.

Gnudi means “naked dumpling,” because it’s truly a stuffing without a pasta shell. So if you love those stuffings in ravioli, skip the pasta—this dish is for you.

I hope you’ve saved some meatballs and sugo (page 146) for this wonderful fresh-pasta lasagna. But if you haven’t, you can follow the basic procedure using sliced, cooked Italian sausage meat instead of the meatballs and another tomato sauce. Note that you’ll need a bit more than a single batch of egg pasta dough—4 extra ounces to be specific—so just make two batches and freeze the extra.

Manicotti are delicious and provide an easy way to enjoy the textures of stuffed fresh pasta baked in sauce.

If you happen to have some meatballs and sugo left over from the recipe on page 146, here’s a simple baked dish that will put them to good use. Just toss them with cooked cavatappi—spiral pastas that do look like corkscrews—and cheeses, then bake. You can also bake this in a mold and turn it out, as a lovely golden torta. Press the filling to fit into a 10-cup Bundt pan or soufflé dish, generously buttered and coated with bread crumbs. Sprinkle bread crumbs and grated cheese on the top (which will become the bottom), and bake at 400° until the edges are golden.

You can make this colorful and fresh-tasting dish anytime with a batch of Twenty-Minute Marinara Sauce and cherry or grape tomatoes, which are in the market almost year-round and often are sweeter than large tomatoes. This is one baked dish in which I use fresh mozzarella in the filling. I love its texture and fresh taste in uncooked or quick cooked pastas, and these can be lost in long cooking. Buy small whole mozzarella balls, an inch in diameter, if you can. Sometimes they are called bocconcini, little mouthfuls, but in my neighborhood the supermarket calls them ciliegine, little cherries. Toss them whole with the hot pasta so they keep their integrity in the baking dish—you don’t want them to melt away like shredded mozzarella on top.

Almost every region of northern Italy has some version of potato-stuffed ravioli. The potato is a constant, whereas the flavoring may change, from onion to chard to raisins to pine nuts. You can come up with some of your favorites. But in my house everybody loves potato-and-bacon ravioli, even fussy kids. You can do all the cooking ahead of time if you want—just mash up the filling while it’s still warm, then refrigerate.

This delicate and quite simple ravioli is a lovely way to enjoy the affinity of pear and cheese. The filling is a lively blend of shredded ripe pear, shredded 3- to-6-months-aged Pecorino Romano (it should be semisoft), and mascarpone—just stirred together at the last moment.

This is a fine fast sauce for Shrimp and Tomato Ravioli and Simple Ricotta Ravioli (preceding recipes) as well as for Potato, Leek, and Bacon Ravioli (page 186). Make the sauce just before the ravioli come out of the pot, for the freshest taste. You should definitely peel the tomatoes for this: see my method on page 261.

Small shrimp cook right inside these very fresh-tasting ravioli. You don’t need fancy big shrimp for this: small and inexpensive “41/50s” (which means there are forty-one to fifty shrimp in a pound) are a good size, or even smaller rock shrimp. Make the simple flavored butter a bit ahead of time, and chill it in the freezer to facilitate handling.

This is a simple, pure version of cheese ravioli, without the eggs that are usually added to firm up the filling. Use fresh whole-milk ricotta with large curds and drain it thoroughly to get the best consistency. With creamy fillings such as this one, I feel that a slightly thicker dough provides more texture and is preferable to a very thin dough. If you roll your dough strips to get eighteen or twenty ravioli—following the guidelines below—that’s better than trying to stretch them to get twenty-four. All you need is enough sauce to coat the ravioli lightly. So those small portions of sauces you have saved in the freezer might be just enough to dress a batch.

Spinach pasta is essential to Pasticciata Bolognese (page 200), but you can enjoy it in all the cuts and shapes of fresh pasta. It is best to start prepping the spinach well ahead of time, as detailed in the recipe, for the best texture. You can always freeze the dough until you need it. Spinach pasta is usually more moist than other fresh pastas and so will cook more quickly.

These three pasta doughs look almost identical on paper all purpose flour, eggs, olive oil, water. So you may wonder: How do I know which one to make? Which is the best? The truth is, I’d love to have you make all three so you can see and feel and taste the big differences that result from small variations. And you will realize there is no single “best.” As Italian cooks know, you can mix flour into a fine pasta dough with whatever eggoil water mixture you like, whatever is available in the pantry, or whatever you can afford. This last factor in particular reflects the way pasta has fit into Italian life for centuries: The rich man can have his cook make pasta moistened entirely with fat-laden, tasty egg yolks. A poor family might make their Sunday pasta with one precious egg (and have weekday pasta mixed only with water and a bit of oil). And families in between make pasta with the ingredients they have. But don’t be fooled. The richest is not necessarily best. With two eggs and a goodly amount of extra-virgin olive oil, Poor Man’s Pasta is quite rich and delicious (frankly, it’s my favorite). Part of the fun is in mixing and matching the right pasta with the most compatible sauce, and you’ll find guidance in the pages ahead as well as the challenge to try your own pairings.

Marinara is my quintessential anytime tomato sauce. I can start it when the pasta water goes on the stove and it will be ready when the pasta is just cooked. Yet, in its short cooking time, it develops such fine flavor and pleasing consistency that you may well want to make a double batch—using some right away and freezing the rest for suppers to come. The beauty of this marinara sauce is that it has a freshness, acidity, and simplicity of taste, in contrast to the complexity and mellowness of the long-cooking tomato sauce that follows. This recipe for marinara includes lots of fresh basil, which I keep in the house at all times, now that it is available in local supermarkets year-round. I cook a whole basil stalk (or a handful of big sprigs with many leaves attached) submerged in the tomatoes to get all the herb flavor. Then I remove these and finish the sauce and pasta with fresh shredded leaves, giving it another layer of fresh-basil taste. (If you are freezing some of the sauce, by the way, you can wait until you’re cooking with it to add the fresh-basil garnish.) This sauce can be your base for cooking any fish fillet, chicken breast, pork fillet, or veal scaloppini. Sear any of these in a pan, add some marinara sauce, season with your favorite herbs, and let it perk for a few minutes—you’ll have yourself a good dish.

Asparagus frittata and pasta . . . If you think you have seen a recipe of mine that sounds like this one, you are right. In an earlier book I gave a recipe for an “Asparagus Frittata with Capellini.” And here’s “Spaghetti with Asparagus Frittata.” But they are not at all the same, even though the ingredients are nearly identical. In the earlier recipe, a bit of leftover cooked pasta is stirred into a frittata as it cooks and bakes into a tender cake, which is then served in wedges. Here you have a quick skillet pasta. In fact, it is a “two-skillet” pasta. In the big skillet you make a very simple sauce with oil, scallions, and pasta water. In another skillet, you scramble up a soft frittata with sautéed asparagus. You also cook a pot of spaghetti. When everything is tossed together—in the big skillet—the textures, tastes, and colors blend beautifully. Follow the recipe instructions for coordinating the cooking the first time you make this. Once you see and sense how everything goes together, you’ll have added a truly wonderful dish to your repertoire of family recipes. This is a good dish to make with fresh homemade egg pastas, such as fettuccine, garganelli, pappardelle, capellini, spaghettini. Instead of asparagus, you could use another vegetable in your frittata, such as zucchini, broccoli, or just onions; or ham, prosciutto, or bacon. Or have a plain frittata.

Here the meaty skillet sauce and the ziti cook at a leisurely pace compared to the rapidity of the preceding capellini with caper sauce. But the cooking principles are the same. In the first few minutes you want to caramelize each ingredient as it is introduced to the pan—this is especially important with the tomato paste, to give it a good toasting before it is liquefied in the pasta water. The sauce needs 6 minutes or more at a good bubbling simmer after adding the water in order to draw out and meld the flavors of the meat and vegetables as well as to soften the pieces of fresh fennel. At that time the ziti will be ready to finish cooking in the sauce.

This recipe provides a good introduction to the quick skillet sauces and pastas in this section. Typical of these dishes, it’s quick: the sauce itself cooks in 5 minutes in the skillet, and the capellini I’ve paired it with needs barely 2 minutes in the pot; when all is tossed and garnished, the pasta is on the table in 10 minutes. And it demonstrates how well a pasta dish can be created from common pantry ingredients when they are cooked and combined thoughtfully. With its generous amounts of anchovies, capers, peperoncino flakes, garlic, and tomato, I can honestly tell you that this is the kind of pasta I love to eat. The flavors are strong and sharp yet balanced—staccato notes in harmony, to use a musical metaphor. In the recipe, I’ve given a range of amounts for the bold ingredients. If you use the lesser measures of anchovies, capers, peperoncino, and garlic, you will enjoy a distinctive dish suited for most people’s tastes, what I call “middle of the road” at my restaurants. If you use the greater measure, you’ll have the same dish I make for myself at home. Incidentally, you don’t need to use perfect summer tomatoes for this sauce. Even in winter, decent market tomatoes will work as long as they’re not too soft. If none are available, you can make a fine sauce without tomato at all (just don’t substitute canned tomatoes). You’ll need more pasta water for moisture, but otherwise follow the recipe. Like all sauces, this one goes with many pastas. In addition to thin varieties like the capellini, presented here, I suggest linguine, spaghettini, or just regular spaghetti. Remember to coordinate the cooking of the sauce with the cooking time of each kind of pasta. If I was cooking linguine that takes 9 or 10 minutes in the pot, I would put the pasta in first and then start cooking my sauce, reversing the sequence given in the recipe.

Passatelli are a traditional soup garnish that resemble fat round noodles (see the photo, above) but they’re made with dried bread crumbs rather than flour. This gives them lots of flavor and a pleasant crumbly texture; in fact, they may remind you of matzoh balls, the Jewish soup dumplings that are also made from dried crumbs and eggs. Passatelli are a snap to make—well ahead if you want—and they cook in less than 5 minutes, right in the soup pot, just before you serve the soup. They are a splendid addition to plain broths, either All-Purpose Turkey Broth (see page 80) or chicken poaching broth (see page 328), and they’d be a nice addition to Savory Potato Broth as well (see page 63). For this small amount of passatelli, I suggest using the simple method of rolling and cutting in the recipe. The shape is not traditional but the taste and texture are exactly as they should be. It doesn’t seem like a lot but the passatelli swell up nicely in the soup. If you want a larger quantity, just multiply the formula here.