One of Italy's most famous dishes is pasta made from durum wheat. This variety pasta conquered the whole world! Italian pasta, made according to traditional recipes, is used to prepare a variety of dishes. The quality of products, which you can order on our website, is on top!
How to choose Italian pasta
Pasta from Italy differs in size and shape. Our electronic catalog will help you choose the options that are right for you. Each item is provided with a detailed description with an indication of the price. Quality products, created with love, will become a table decoration.
When choosing, you should pay attention to the following parameters:
- manufacturer. Well-known products trademarks most preferred;
- appearance. The paste has a rough surface and a golden-sunny color;
- price. Good italian pasta are more expensive than low-grade options;
- package. It must contain the marking of the wheat variety.
HOW TO EAT ITALIAN PASTA?
The classic way is with a tablespoon in the left hand and a dinner fork in the right hand. But real Italians only eat pasta with a fork! And nothing else. So forget about spoons, two forks, chopsticks and other innovative devices. Give pasta the respect it deserves - eat it right!
USEFUL ADVICE FOR TOURISTS IN ITALY
Are you going on vacation to Italy? It's important to know! The restaurant never writes "pasta", but directly indicates its type. For example, "spaghettiallacarbonara".
High quality pasta from leading manufacturers will delight you with excellent taste. Products from well-known areas of Italy - Liguria, Veneto, Umbria, Sardinia, Lazio, Campania, Puglia are good for health. Our range is constantly updated. Choose quality at affordable prices!
The basis of the paste is flour, and it affects the texture ready meal first of all. Type 00 flour is considered ideal for pasta, for its preparation only the endosperm of the grain containing protein and starch is ground, and the result is a mixture resembling baby powder: smooth, fine and snow-white. It is this flour that will give the most silky dough for pasta. Unfortunately, in our realities, it is quite difficult to find flour of such grinding, but the usual Wheat flour, which is called all-purpose flour in foreign literature, is in everyone's kitchen. It is quite suitable as the basis of our pasta.
Pour a pinch of salt into the center of the "well" and add the eggs. If you want to make the pasta more nutritious and give it a bright yellow hue, then replace whole eggs with yolks alone in equivalent sizes, but note that such a pasta is more likely to crumble and shrink when rolled out.
With a fork, beat the eggs in the “well”, gradually picking up flour from the edges, and when a viscous mass forms in the center, start kneading the dough by hand. This process should last at least 10 minutes, as a result, the dough will become so pliable and elastic that you will want to keep kneading it endlessly.
At this point, form the dough into a ball, wrap in cling film (it dries very quickly) and refrigerate for at least half an hour before rolling out. During this time, the gluten will relax under the influence of hydration, which will greatly facilitate the work with the dough.
Now the hardest part is rolling. If you have a pasta machine, then there should be no problems. But most amateur home cooks do not have such an aggregate at hand, which means that you will have to roll out the pasta the old fashioned way - with a rolling pin. The rule here is: the thinner, the better. Therefore, make sure that the dough is no more than 2 mm thick and rolled out evenly over the entire surface.
Fold the rolled out dough into thirds and cut.
Spread the pasta and store or start cooking. You can store fresh pasta in the refrigerator for no more than a day, or you can pack it in bags, after folding it into “nests”, and send it to the freezer. Cooking fresh pasta is enough for about 60-90 seconds, and then you can pour over it olive oil, topped with your favorite sauce.
Ingredients:
- 3 large eggs;
- 300 g flour;
- a pinch of salt.
Cooking
- Sift the flour on the work surface in a slide and make a “well” in the center of the slide.
- In the resulting "well" add three eggs, salt and start beating the eggs with a fork, gradually picking up the flour from the edges.
- When it becomes hard to work with a fork, start kneading the dough with your hands, collecting the remaining flour, for about 10 minutes.
- Form the kneaded dough into a ball and wrap with a film, then leave it to rest in the refrigerator for half an hour to a whole day.
- Roll out the rested dough as thinly as possible using a pasta machine or a rolling pin. Fold the layer 3-4 times and cut.
- Cooking pasta is enough for about 60-90 seconds.
Fresh pasta is fresh because it has a short shelf life - several days in the refrigerator at a temperature of about + 4ºС. If you need longer, a freezer will help, where it can be for several weeks and even months without any damage to the taste. If the manufacturer packed the paste in a vacuum, its shelf life is two weeks without a refrigerator, in the refrigerator it is longer.
egg paste with Fabbrica Pasta Fresca constantly sold in the store LavkaLavka. You can buy it at festive city fairs on Tverskaya Square and as part of the project's grocery baskets Local Food. And the easiest way is to go to the official website of the manufacturer and order the paste online. Pasta is packaged in small cardboard boxes, so you need to store it in the refrigerator and no more than 4 days.
Pasta is made exclusively from durum wheat . Exactly - " durum wheat" Biologists will call this plant, and this phrase is much more correct than the common "durum wheat". Durum wheat flour differs from soft wheat flour in its yellowish-cream color and in that it contains much less gluten (which is why bread made from such wheat does not rise well).
By the way, many manufacturers, including Italians who export pasta to Russia, mix durum and soft wheat flour - this significantly reduces the cost of production. On the packaging, the crafty inscription “Produced exclusively from durum wheat” flaunts. It is better not to trust her, but a specific, proven manufacturer, your own eyes and taste, as well as the price - real fresh durum wheat pasta is not cheap.
Manufacturer specific flour for pasta Fabbrica Pasta Fresca buy from Italy. In Italy, there are several traditional types of durum wheat flour - they differ in the type of grain (whole-hulled), grinding (first-second, coarse-fine) and sifting. After the first coarse grinding of durum wheat grains, sharp crystalline and translucent granules with a characteristic yellowish wheat color are obtained - this is flour for pasta, semola calibrata, and it is not at all like the usual bread flour made from soft wheat, white and powdery.
Usual composition of egg paste- semolina flour, water and eggs. As we were assured Fabbrica Pasta Fresca, egg melange (that is, a ready-made protein-yolk egg mixture) and egg powder are never used - only natural eggs. Egg yolks give the pasta a distinct yellow color. This, of course, if the paste does not contain additional natural dyes, then the color will be different.
Freshly cooked pasta should dry out a little - only after that it is packaged. In this case, they are packed by sprinkling with flour - ordinary, from soft wheat, baking, it absorbs moisture much better than flour from durum wheat. This is necessary so that the paste does not stick together.
I ordered two types of pasta from the store - maccheroni with cuttlefish ink and ricotta ravioli. At home, the maccheroni ended up on one of the shelves of the refrigerator, and the ravioli were in the freezer. The Italian counterpart to Russian dumplings, ravioli stick together easily due to the higher (compared to other types of pasta) moisture, so it's better not to risk it.
Pasta fresco is prepared very quickly - no more than five minutes, even less is better. The main thing is not to skip the degree of al dente, otherwise it will be excruciatingly painful for the wasted pasta. The optimal degree of doneness brings out its taste and delicate texture best of all.
Black pasta is a product familiar to Italians and quite exotic for Russians. The black color of this paste is given by cuttlefish ink, less often by squid. The taste of seafood is almost not felt in it, so you can cook it, in principle, with any kind of sauce. However, the “black pasta with seafood” option is, of course, the most natural. Quickly fry the onions, add seafood to them and after a couple of minutes season them with sour cream - the sauce is ready. Stir into boiled maccheroni butter, then fill them with seafood sauce.
Sauce to ravioli with ricotta should be less bright so as not to drown out delicate taste cheese. I melted butter in a frying pan, added halves of cherry tomatoes to it, chopped some parsley and basil. The taste of fresh pasta and ricotta did not suffer - on the contrary, it opened up fully and voluminously.
Maccheroni with cuttlefish ink (egg), ricotta ravioli, ТМ Fabbrica Pasta Fresca, Moscow, 350/500 g, 300 rubles each
