Italian recipes, and the techniques that make them work

Pasta water, and finishing in the pan

Drain the pasta a minute before the packet time and finish it in the pan with a ladle of its cooking water: the dissolved starch is what turns fat and liquid into a sauce that clings rather than pooling under it.

Salt the water at 10 g per litre (about two teaspoons per quart) and use roughly two-thirds of the usual litre per 100 g of pasta, so it leaves the pot visibly cloudy. Then toss hard for sixty to ninety seconds, the mantecatura. The pan should end up almost dry, with the sauce on the pasta: soupy means keep going, tight and matte means another splash of water. Cheese and cold butter go in off the heat, always.

That last rule is why cacio e pepe fails. Pecorino Romano seizes into rubbery strings above roughly 70 °C (160 °F), so grate it finely, slacken it to a paste with water that has stopped steaming, and combine away from the burner. Carbonara is the same problem with egg, which sets at about 65 °C (150 °F) and scrambles just above: render the guanciale from a cold pan and take the pan off the heat before yolk and pasta meet. Cream is what cooks reach for once the emulsion has broken. Done properly this is a weeknight dinner that takes twenty minutes.

Soffritto, and what three hours does to a ragù

Soffritto is the base under most Italian savoury cooking: onion, carrot and celery at roughly 2:1:1, cut fine and sweated over a low flame for twelve to fifteen minutes until the onion is translucent and tastes sweet.

Rush it over high heat and the harshness is still there three hours later. Ragù alla bolognese is that base plus time: coarse minced beef browned hard, white wine reduced away, milk cooked in until it disappears, a modest amount of tomato, then two and a half to three hours at a bare simmer with the lid ajar. The meat is cooked through in minutes; the hours turn connective tissue into gelatine, which is what gives the sauce its clinging body. Serve it on tagliatelle, which holds what slides off spaghetti, and freeze half for a night you have no time.

Pasta al pomodoro argues the opposite: tinned whole tomatoes crushed by hand, a garlic clove infused in oil and removed, twenty minutes, basil off the heat. Nothing has time to transform, so the dish is only as good as the tin.

Risotto, in the order that matters

Risotto is a controlled way of pulling starch out of rice rather than a rice dish with stock poured over it, which is why the sequence is the recipe.

Use carnaroli, arborio or vialone nano, short-grain Italian rices with enough surface starch to build their own sauce, which long-grain and basmati do not have. Begin with the tostatura: two or three minutes toasting the dry rice in butter until the grains are hot and their edges translucent around a white core, then deglaze with wine and let it evaporate completely.

Feed it warm stock a ladle at a time from a second pan held at a bare simmer; a cold ladleful drops the pan temperature, the rice stops shedding starch, and the grains cook unevenly. Taste from sixteen minutes, then finish off the heat with cold butter and Parmigiano beaten in hard and two minutes' riposo under a lid. Tip the pan and it should move in a slow wave. Risotto alla milanese is this, with saffron bloomed in hot stock near the end.

Pizza dough: hydration and time

Pizza dough is flour, water, salt and very little yeast, and almost everything worth knowing about it is a question of how much water it holds and how long it is left alone.

For a domestic oven, 60, 65% hydration, 650 g of water to a kilo of strong 00 flour, is soft enough to open by hand and stiff enough to move on a peel. Use 2, 3% salt and around 1 g of fresh yeast per kilo, then ferment 24 to 48 hours at 4, 6 °C (39, 43 °F). Time does the work kneading otherwise has to: flavour develops and the gluten organises with a few folds. Dough that tastes strongly of yeast has been rushed.

Bake on a steel or stone preheated at maximum for a full 45 minutes, because the base cooks on stored heat from below rather than hot air. A pizza margherita wants restraint: raw crushed tomato rather than cooked sauce, fior di latte torn and drained so it cannot flood the base, basil after the bake.

Short lists leave the ingredients nowhere to hide

Almost every canonical Italian dish has fewer than eight ingredients, and that is the difficulty rather than the convenience: the tomato, the oil and the cheese have to be good, because nothing on the plate covers for them.

Pesto alla genovese is six things and no cooking, and heat spoils it twice over, a fast blade oxidises the basil into something dull, and pesto stirred into a hot pan turns bitter, so work it cold and loosen it with pasta water off the burner. Melanzane alla parmigiana needs the sliced aubergine salted for 30 to 45 minutes and blotted dry, or it drinks oil and weeps water; roast at 220 °C (425 °F), layer thinly, and rest the baked dish 20 minutes so it sets. Both sit close to plant-based cooking with real structure.

North and south are two different kitchens

There is no single Italian cuisine: broadly, the north cooks in butter with rice and fresh egg pasta, and the south in olive oil with dried semolina pasta and tomato. Most apparent contradictions in Italian recipes come from that line.

Frequently asked questions

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