Make pasta you can't refuse

It is one of the necessities of a life lived well to know how to cook pasta. In Italy, every household has at least one pasta cook, preferably two in case one is seduced by the prime minister or runs off with a passing tenor. If you are Sicilian, it is best to have at least four in the family, so that if most of the clan suddenly gets wiped out there is still one left to cook for the survivors.

To cook bad pasta in Italy is a criminal and disgraceful thing, an activity that can bring shame upon your family for generations.

If your pasta is less than perfectly al dente, scowling, toothless crones swathed in black cross themselves when you come near, then scurry away down dark alleyways burbling in Latin. It is worse in Sicily. There, if you cook bad pasta you wake up next morning with the dog strung from the ceiling and your car riddled with bullet holes. It is better to admit to sleeping with underage girls or to be a serial adulterer than cook bad pasta.

The day I learnt to make pasta properly was the day I took Giuliano Hazan's advice to ignore the instructions on the pasta packet and trust my own instincts. Hazan, London-based son of lauded Italian food writer Marcella, published what I think is the world's best pasta book, Dorling Kindersley's The Classic Pasta Cookbook. I plundered it years ago and its many lessons have stayed with me.

I love making a decent pasta sauce, and I try to keep it simple. The last thing a good pasta sauce needs is too many ingredients, which is why the more pretentious of contemporary chefs don't always get it right when dressing pasta. It's also not about how pretty it looks in a picture - what counts is how it tastes, its textures, and how well the sauce and the pasta meld. So a sauce with bits of things in it, like slices of courgette or mushrooms, is often best with small pasta shapes like shells or tubes, designed to "hold" those bits and pieces; a smooth, creamy sauce is better with fettuce (long, flat-sided ribbons) like fettucine or tagliatelle, or with pasta lunga (long, but round-edged, pasta) like spaghetti or linguine.

Like riding a bicycle, cooking pasta is easy when you know how, but the method is specific. The water must be in a big pot, boiling furiously, and there must be lots of it, with plenty of room for the pasta to move around. The pasta must go in all at once. You must stir it immediately to separate all the pieces (if ever you've been served pasta that's stuck together, it means the chef did not stir at this point). Then you cover it until it is boiling again, and remove the lid and boil until it is al dente. Don't time it - the time has nothing to do with anything.

Practise until you know, instinctively, when the pasta is ready. After a while you just know - and you test it by removing a strand and stretching it between your fingers, and biting a bit off.

Then pour it through a colander, shake it a few times and drain. The sauce needs to be ready by this point. I simply add the drained pasta back into the pot of sauce, or you can have the sauce ready in a warmed bowl and add the pasta to that, and toss carefully with a wooden spoon and fork - do this from the outside of the bowl towards the middle. Plate immediately and serve with grated parmesan (in most cases - some sauces aren't improved).

The habit of piling a mound of sauce on top of pasta on the plate is not Italian. If you're in that habit, it's one to break. There can also be too much sauce - we South Africans tend to use way too much, so try using a little less so that the pasta and the sauce become a harmonious entity, without the sauce spoiling the simplicity of it all.

I made three pasta sauces in the preparation for this column. Rosemary is not a commonplace ingredient for pasta, though you will find it in some Italian recipes. I love mushrooms, and the way they take on flavour. Garlic and lemon are wonderful with mushrooms, as is wine, white or red, dry or sweet, even port.

The ingredients for my mushroom and rosemary sauce were onion, garlic, white wine, four varieties of mushrooms (white button, brown, portabellini and shiitake), mascarpone, fresh rosemary and parmesan. Simmer the finely chopped onion in olive oil until soft, add very finely chopped rosemary and garlic, simmer for two minutes, add white wine and the chopped or sliced mushrooms, bring to a boil then reduce to simmer on a medium heat, uncovered, until the mushrooms are cooked and the sauce has the desired consistency. Stir in the mascarpone until it has melted, and serve immediately with parmesan shavings.

Gorgonzola is one of my favourite cheeses, and I'm a spinach fan too. So, planning two sauces, I first simmered chopped onions in olive oil (don't be too shy when using olive oil for pasta, it needs more than a dash) with garlic, added white wine and reduced it a little, then divide it into two saucepans. Separately, I cooked baby spinach leaves quickly in olive oil with garlic, then added this to one saucepan, then adding cubes of gorgonzola. Melt it through, stir and serve immediately with penne.

To the second saucepan I added halved baby Italian tomatoes, and a small jar of marinated artichokes with their marinating liquid, heated it through and served with linguine.

The spinach and gorgonzola sauce was way the most successful, followed by the mushroom and rosemary sauce. The artichoke and tomato option was no embarrassment, but if you're going to try only one of this trio, make it the spinach and gorgonzola.

Just don't overcook the penne if you want to live to see another day, capisce?

• This article was originally published on page 8 of The Cape Argus on November 15, 2009

Source : Babynet