9 ms·

Pasta and sauce are not meant to be separate. Once you cook the pasta, drain it, and immediately toss with the sauce. This is part of the reason it was meant to

by muzani 4y ago

Pasta and sauce are not meant to be separate. Once you cook the pasta, drain it, and immediately toss with the sauce. This is part of the reason it was meant to be al dente, to absorb and deliver the flavor of the sauce better. Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce; it expands when freshly cooked but not when cool. Also most sauce recipes are probably overcomplicated. Most need less than 5 ingredients. You probably don't need all that onion and garlic, but one of them. Definitely not two tablespoons of dried oregano. The way you cut onions and garlic changes the flavor a lot too. Finely minced garlic, from a food processor or garlic press can be overpowering yet not deliver the flavor. One trick is to crush the garlic and let the oil it's in carry the flavor. Half an onion can work really well in a sauce you cooking for half an hour.

cabalamat 4y ago
> Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce Why is this bad with rice? When I make a stew I often put some rice in, with the expectation that the rice will absorb some of the stew.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  Same. Also to make risotto you cook the rice with everything else and keep stirring so the rice absorbs all of it whilst releasing starch to make that creamy texture.
- muzani 4y ago
  It doesn't work well with most Asian dishes with sauces. Such as butter chicken, curry, the stuff with coconut milk, sambal. I think stew might be an exception, because you want it to be porridge-like. But for many sauces, that's too soggy. You usually want it to soak for a few seconds to minutes but not an hour.
- jerf 4y ago
  Rice can almost fully disintegrate if left in water, and will become something that disintegrates even more if stirred or agitated. In many other applications it replaces a pleasantly tactile and textured starch with a sort of sludge slurry, but as is often the case if you know and expect this it can be used in some applications advantageously. Thickening a stew is one of them. It's actually my favorite stew thickener. We discovered this the hard way once, though. We just "threw some rice" into a stew, and, well, if you put enough "sludge slurry" into a stew it starts to dominate... since then, though, it's been something very useful, especially since I'm allergic to flour, one of the traditional choices.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  It's not bad, per se. It depends what you're going for. There's a lot of different ways to cook rice "properly" depending on the end dish. Congee, risotto, paella, sushi, etc. all have you cook rice differently while adding various degrees of liquid at different times.
jacknews 4y ago
Also, you don't have to boil the pasta for the full 8 minutes or whatever, just the first couple of minutes, then let it sit, eg https://www.barilla.com/en-gb/passive-cooking https://www.barilla.com/en-gb/passive-cooking
- jdmtheNth 4y ago
  I cared while I thought it was a way to better pasta. Very disappointing.
  - jacknews 4y ago
    It's pasta, in boiling/hot water, so I'm not sure there are many variables apart from time. I don't believe there's a 'gourmet method' or anything like that which can get better results than just 'correctly cooked' pasta. But, you can measure the perfect cooking time/hydration by measuring the length ratio of cooked/dry (assuming spaghetti): https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2201/2201.09621.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2201/2201.09621.pdf Perhaps you could use this to devise a protocol to parboil the pasta, and then finish hydrating it to the perfect consistency in the hot sauce.
- dgacmu 4y ago
  +1. I used to subscribe to "huge pot of boiling water" until Kenji studied it. https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boiling-tips-the-food-lab https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boi... I've switched to his method. It works really well. Doesn't take as long to boil, uses less gas, uses less water, uses less salt (b/c you waste less in the water). Now I just heat the water to boiling, throw in the pasta, let it come back to a boil, stir a bunch, turn off the heat, and put the lid on. Works every time.
  - bakoo 4y ago
    Had to wade through a lot of bad advice before finding a fellow Kenji acolyte ;) That man is an excellent teacher and a great mythbuster.
- 4y ago
donatj 4y ago
I really thought I hated spaghetti growing up. My parents would boil the noodles and then pour room temp sauce from a jar at the table individually. It was inedible. I was visiting a friend and had it all cooked together in the pan for the first time and it was eye opening.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  [flagged]
- thiscatis 4y ago
  Room temp sauce on cooked pasta?! Just gagged reading this.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    clammy mouth noises
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Can be the right thing to do—if it's not a red sauce. Pesto, oil-"sauces", that kind of thing.
    - pc86 4y ago
      That probably wouldn't be described as "inedible" then.
    - donatj 4y ago
      It was red sauce. Anything other than red sauce is too fancy for my parents. My wife and I always heat the pesto a little in the pan - is that not the right thing to do?
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Pesto burns really easily and its flavors after cooking are generally regarded as worse than when it's uncooked. Heating it a little probably doesn't hurt, but it's intended to be kind of a fresh sauce, so, little or no cooking. Doesn't come through as well with the jar stuff vs. home-made, but still.
SpaceL10n 4y ago
To mix or not to mix? That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer, the soaking of pasta in outrageous marinara, or to take arms against a sea of sauce. I remember Anthony Bourdain asking his Sicilian family this question, and the table erupted in hot debate. I'm not sure you are "wrong".
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Mixing and finishing the pasta in the sauce results in better tasting food. I don't care if some angry Sicilian claims that's not "authentic" or some garbage. They don't own the concept of pasta in tomato sauce anymore.
  - torstenvl 4y ago
    They never did. Tomatoes are 100% American. They do not grow natively in Italy or anywhere else in Europe.
    - buildbot 4y ago
      I always found this to be extremely amusing, so much of our cultural food touchstones are less old than we think. Tempura for example, is originally Portuguese. Salmon was not used for sushi until pretty recently (needs to be flash frozen to be safe for this one). Japanese curry? From Britain! By way if India.
      - bckr 4y ago
        Biryani? Adapted from Persian cooking.
        buildbot 4y ago
        Ooo that’s a new one for me, awesome! Biryani is so good.
      - acchow 4y ago
hgsgm 4y ago
> it expands when freshly cooked but not when cool. Make noodle soup and let it sit in the fridge for a week. It will expand.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Yeah but "let sit in fridge for a week" is probably not a great instruction in the middle of an easy weeknight dinner.
ahallock 4y ago
I agree that people need to learn to combine them (add a little butter, too!). I like both variations, honestly. With most things, it's not either or, and there are different taste profiles. It's like variations on pizza where the sauce is added last.
efxhoy 4y ago
I learned this from the sopranos: https://youtu.be/J2TkCgLooRU https://youtu.be/J2TkCgLooRU
nlh 4y ago
Two related tips while on the subject: 1) Salt your pasta water! Pasta is meant to be cooked in salty water that, according and excellently-put by Samin Nosrat (Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) - "is reminiscent of the sea". 2) Save and use a splash of ("dirty") pasta water - aka the water the pasta was just cooked in - when you're tossing the pasta with the sauce. The water is filled with delightful liquified starch from the pasta, and it helps the sauce coat the pasta more thoroughly.
- 4ggr0 4y ago
  > "is reminiscent of the sea" Had lots of funny moments in my life relating to salting pasta water. Almost all the people I know put like two pinches of salt into the water. Which causes them to look at me like I'm a psycho when I pour salt in for almost a full second, straight out of the container. I can +1 both of your tips, I follow them both since I learned to cook and they're a (small but effective) game-changer.
  - raldi 4y ago
    For our big pasta pot, I put in a literal handful.
    - 4ggr0 4y ago
      I can try to measure the amount I put in, but I'd guess it would be pretty close to a handful, yeah.
  - duped 4y ago
    I agree it's kind of absurd to "salt" your pasta water with a pinch of salt (you're doing nothing!), but for me it's a lot more efficient to let the sauce to have the saltiness than to waste handfuls of salt going into water that I'm going to dump out. INB4, "save your pasta water." I don't have a big kitchen or freezer, a pot full of water is a giant waste of space for me.
    - nameless912 4y ago
fedeb95 4y ago
The following is well known by Italians, but apparently not the rest of the world so I'll post here. I'll use italian names whenever I don't know the english ones so you can search them and make a cool impression on friends. This is the base of any tomato based sauce: 1. Choose your soffritto base. Onion or garlic are fine, more exotic variations include scalogno or porro. 2. Choose your tomato. Canned, fresh, whatever, just keep in mind that fresh ones may need longer cooking times. As for canned, check that they contain no seasoning at all! 3. Choose your grease. Oil or butter are fine, the standard is olive oil though. It may be hard to find proper olive oil outside of Italy I'm told. 4. Start cooking. Put your oil in a large pan, enough to contain all the pasta you plan to use afterwards. Not too much oil: just enough to cover the pan with a thin layer. Don't start heating the pan. 5. Cut your onion or whatever in small pieces and add them to the oil. Now turn on the heat at a reasonable level. Not too high but not low. Don't touch the onion! 6. When the onion looks a bit browny (not dark brown), add the tomato and lower at minimum the heat. If you have a thermometer, ideally you don't want to cross 60 degrees celsius over all the cooking period. This period can vary between 10 minutes and 60 minutes, it gives different tastes (all good) to the sauce. If you opt for the shortest time, go back at step 5 and at the same time start the next step. 7. Put 1l of water for every 100g of pasta in a pot. Add salt. With experience you'll get the right amount, usually I use about a small fist for two people (160-200g). Heat up the water and wait until boiling. 8. Drop the pasta in the water. Start a chronometer. Almost immediately mix it or otherwise it will stick. Wait a couple of minutes and mix again. 9. Meanwhile the sauce will start bubbling and, depending on your kitchen, you may need to mix it. If you see large discrepancies in texture, definitely mix. Otherwise don't. If it becomes too dry, add some water from the cooking pasta to the sauce. 10. When the chronometer is at cooking_time_on_pasta_packaging - 2 minutes, take a glass of water and fill it with water from the pasta pot. Dry the pasta, and put it in the pan with the sauce. Make the heat level for the pan a bit higher. 11. Cook it until "al dente", that is still a bit hard at the inside, but not completely. If the sauce dries too much (it should, if not turn the heat higher), add the water you kept in the glass. This step is where science stops and art begins: you need to calibrate your taste to your desired results and in turn calibrate water and heating. During all this step, mix your pasta in the same direction continuously. This is called "risottatura". Taste the pasta while cooking often. 11. Take everything off the fire, serve, add parmisan. Edit: look at maccard comment for water and salt because I don't recall the right quantities. After a while you go by eye. Edit 2: preventing more comments on oil, that is merely my very limited experience and I'd say, as a rule of thumb (not incontrovertible truth), that if you like your oil alone with bread it is a good oil.
2-718-281-828 4y ago
and the secret spice of any sauce is ... sugar. yes, I'm very sorry. thank me later
maliker 4y ago
Someone introduced me to making red sauce by basically just cooking tomatoes for as much time as I have, and it's now my go-to red sauce. Really amazing how good just well-cooked tomatoes are. https://www.seriouseats.com/frankies-tomato-sauce-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/frankies-tomato-sauce-recipe
- bckr 4y ago
  +1 just for the link to Serious Eats. If you have a recipe in mind to make, look it up on Serious Eats. Their MO is to give you ideas on how to level up each recipe (compared to food network or similar) and explain the principles behind the techniques.
  - kristjansson 4y ago
    And really do look them up. In my experience they've completely lost the SEO game, so SRPs are not a reliable entry point to their (wealth of) content.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Well that should also be how they make tomato sauce you buy in the store, it's just filtered so you don't get seeds and large pieces of peel in it.
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    You can reduce the olive oil/salt for a lower-calorie/sodium version which is good for weight loss/high blood pressure
throwaway743 4y ago
And if you're making a red sauce, simmer a little anchovy paste or a couple anchovies (till they melt down) first with bay leaf, olive oil, and garlic before adding anything else into the pot. Broken up kalamata olives, basil, and onion are good around that point/shortly after too. And when you add in the tomato puree (or your preference), add a tiny bit of sugar. If the sauce looks like it has a sheen, it's ruined. Just a tiny amount will do. Do this and your sauce will taste 10 times better. Not a fan of anchovies, but you won't even be able to tell.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Relatedly, I spent far too long cooking my pizza sauce, treating it like other red sauces. You can just mix tomato sauce, oregano, salt, and pepper, then slap it on the pie. It cooks in the oven. No need to pre-cook it. [EDIT] unless you're gonna use it for dipping. There's a reason places have a separate "marinara", often, for that purpose. Even giving your pizza sauce a quick simmer will make it a lot better for dipping. Raw pizza sauce is... palatable, but not great, for dipping.
moffkalast 4y ago
> Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce Risotto would like a word.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  You still don't soak risotto, you keep the liquid content within limits. Also different rices.
sllabres 4y ago
Heat your plates (e.g. with the cooking water) and rub dry to prevent your your delicious meal get cold too soon. This is of course not only good for pasta.
bob1029 4y ago
> One trick is to crush the garlic and let the oil it's in carry the flavor. I usually sauté garlic in oil separately, discard the garlic and then use the oil as a sort of super garlic flavor concentrate. I used to believe the actual ingredients were ~80% of the puzzle of cooking. I now believe they're closer to ~20% for most cases. The process you follow is way more important than anything else. Just take a sweet onion for instance. The difference 2-3 minutes makes in a hot pan is incredible. If you simply chopped it up and threw it directly into whatever, you will wind up with something that tastes substantially less flavorful.

by muzani 4y ago

cabalamat 4y ago

> Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce Why is this bad with rice? When I make a stew I often put some rice in, with the expectation that the rice will absorb some of the stew.

cassianoleal 4y ago
Same. Also to make risotto you cook the rice with everything else and keep stirring so the rice absorbs all of it whilst releasing starch to make that creamy texture.
muzani 4y ago
It doesn't work well with most Asian dishes with sauces. Such as butter chicken, curry, the stuff with coconut milk, sambal. I think stew might be an exception, because you want it to be porridge-like. But for many sauces, that's too soggy. You usually want it to soak for a few seconds to minutes but not an hour.
jerf 4y ago
Rice can almost fully disintegrate if left in water, and will become something that disintegrates even more if stirred or agitated. In many other applications it replaces a pleasantly tactile and textured starch with a sort of sludge slurry, but as is often the case if you know and expect this it can be used in some applications advantageously. Thickening a stew is one of them. It's actually my favorite stew thickener. We discovered this the hard way once, though. We just "threw some rice" into a stew, and, well, if you put enough "sludge slurry" into a stew it starts to dominate... since then, though, it's been something very useful, especially since I'm allergic to flour, one of the traditional choices.
dfxm12 4y ago
It's not bad, per se. It depends what you're going for. There's a lot of different ways to cook rice "properly" depending on the end dish. Congee, risotto, paella, sushi, etc. all have you cook rice differently while adding various degrees of liquid at different times.

jacknews 4y ago

Also, you don't have to boil the pasta for the full 8 minutes or whatever, just the first couple of minutes, then let it sit, eg https://www.barilla.com/en-gb/passive-cooking https://www.barilla.com/en-gb/passive-cooking

jdmtheNth 4y ago
I cared while I thought it was a way to better pasta. Very disappointing.
- jacknews 4y ago
  It's pasta, in boiling/hot water, so I'm not sure there are many variables apart from time. I don't believe there's a 'gourmet method' or anything like that which can get better results than just 'correctly cooked' pasta. But, you can measure the perfect cooking time/hydration by measuring the length ratio of cooked/dry (assuming spaghetti): https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2201/2201.09621.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2201/2201.09621.pdf Perhaps you could use this to devise a protocol to parboil the pasta, and then finish hydrating it to the perfect consistency in the hot sauce.
dgacmu 4y ago
+1. I used to subscribe to "huge pot of boiling water" until Kenji studied it. https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boiling-tips-the-food-lab https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boi... I've switched to his method. It works really well. Doesn't take as long to boil, uses less gas, uses less water, uses less salt (b/c you waste less in the water). Now I just heat the water to boiling, throw in the pasta, let it come back to a boil, stir a bunch, turn off the heat, and put the lid on. Works every time.
- bakoo 4y ago
  Had to wade through a lot of bad advice before finding a fellow Kenji acolyte ;) That man is an excellent teacher and a great mythbuster.
4y ago

donatj 4y ago

I really thought I hated spaghetti growing up. My parents would boil the noodles and then pour room temp sauce from a jar at the table individually. It was inedible. I was visiting a friend and had it all cooked together in the pan for the first time and it was eye opening.

pmarreck 4y ago
[flagged]
thiscatis 4y ago
Room temp sauce on cooked pasta?! Just gagged reading this.
- peteradio 4y ago
  clammy mouth noises
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Can be the right thing to do—if it's not a red sauce. Pesto, oil-"sauces", that kind of thing.
  - pc86 4y ago
    That probably wouldn't be described as "inedible" then.
  - donatj 4y ago
    It was red sauce. Anything other than red sauce is too fancy for my parents. My wife and I always heat the pesto a little in the pan - is that not the right thing to do?
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Pesto burns really easily and its flavors after cooking are generally regarded as worse than when it's uncooked. Heating it a little probably doesn't hurt, but it's intended to be kind of a fresh sauce, so, little or no cooking. Doesn't come through as well with the jar stuff vs. home-made, but still.

SpaceL10n 4y ago

To mix or not to mix? That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer, the soaking of pasta in outrageous marinara, or to take arms against a sea of sauce. I remember Anthony Bourdain asking his Sicilian family this question, and the table erupted in hot debate. I'm not sure you are "wrong".

mrguyorama 4y ago
Mixing and finishing the pasta in the sauce results in better tasting food. I don't care if some angry Sicilian claims that's not "authentic" or some garbage. They don't own the concept of pasta in tomato sauce anymore.
- torstenvl 4y ago
  They never did. Tomatoes are 100% American. They do not grow natively in Italy or anywhere else in Europe.
  - buildbot 4y ago
    I always found this to be extremely amusing, so much of our cultural food touchstones are less old than we think. Tempura for example, is originally Portuguese. Salmon was not used for sushi until pretty recently (needs to be flash frozen to be safe for this one). Japanese curry? From Britain! By way if India.
    - bckr 4y ago
      Biryani? Adapted from Persian cooking.
      - buildbot 4y ago
        Ooo that’s a new one for me, awesome! Biryani is so good.
    - acchow 4y ago

hgsgm 4y ago

> it expands when freshly cooked but not when cool. Make noodle soup and let it sit in the fridge for a week. It will expand.

mrguyorama 4y ago
Yeah but "let sit in fridge for a week" is probably not a great instruction in the middle of an easy weeknight dinner.

ahallock 4y ago

I agree that people need to learn to combine them (add a little butter, too!). I like both variations, honestly. With most things, it's not either or, and there are different taste profiles. It's like variations on pizza where the sauce is added last.

efxhoy 4y ago

I learned this from the sopranos: https://youtu.be/J2TkCgLooRU https://youtu.be/J2TkCgLooRU

nlh 4y ago

Two related tips while on the subject: 1) Salt your pasta water! Pasta is meant to be cooked in salty water that, according and excellently-put by Samin Nosrat (Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) - "is reminiscent of the sea". 2) Save and use a splash of ("dirty") pasta water - aka the water the pasta was just cooked in - when you're tossing the pasta with the sauce. The water is filled with delightful liquified starch from the pasta, and it helps the sauce coat the pasta more thoroughly.

4ggr0 4y ago
> "is reminiscent of the sea" Had lots of funny moments in my life relating to salting pasta water. Almost all the people I know put like two pinches of salt into the water. Which causes them to look at me like I'm a psycho when I pour salt in for almost a full second, straight out of the container. I can +1 both of your tips, I follow them both since I learned to cook and they're a (small but effective) game-changer.
- raldi 4y ago
  For our big pasta pot, I put in a literal handful.
  - 4ggr0 4y ago
    I can try to measure the amount I put in, but I'd guess it would be pretty close to a handful, yeah.
- duped 4y ago
  I agree it's kind of absurd to "salt" your pasta water with a pinch of salt (you're doing nothing!), but for me it's a lot more efficient to let the sauce to have the saltiness than to waste handfuls of salt going into water that I'm going to dump out. INB4, "save your pasta water." I don't have a big kitchen or freezer, a pot full of water is a giant waste of space for me.
  - nameless912 4y ago

fedeb95 4y ago

The following is well known by Italians, but apparently not the rest of the world so I'll post here. I'll use italian names whenever I don't know the english ones so you can search them and make a cool impression on friends. This is the base of any tomato based sauce: 1. Choose your soffritto base. Onion or garlic are fine, more exotic variations include scalogno or porro. 2. Choose your tomato. Canned, fresh, whatever, just keep in mind that fresh ones may need longer cooking times. As for canned, check that they contain no seasoning at all! 3. Choose your grease. Oil or butter are fine, the standard is olive oil though. It may be hard to find proper olive oil outside of Italy I'm told. 4. Start cooking. Put your oil in a large pan, enough to contain all the pasta you plan to use afterwards. Not too much oil: just enough to cover the pan with a thin layer. Don't start heating the pan. 5. Cut your onion or whatever in small pieces and add them to the oil. Now turn on the heat at a reasonable level. Not too high but not low. Don't touch the onion! 6. When the onion looks a bit browny (not dark brown), add the tomato and lower at minimum the heat. If you have a thermometer, ideally you don't want to cross 60 degrees celsius over all the cooking period. This period can vary between 10 minutes and 60 minutes, it gives different tastes (all good) to the sauce. If you opt for the shortest time, go back at step 5 and at the same time start the next step. 7. Put 1l of water for every 100g of pasta in a pot. Add salt. With experience you'll get the right amount, usually I use about a small fist for two people (160-200g). Heat up the water and wait until boiling. 8. Drop the pasta in the water. Start a chronometer. Almost immediately mix it or otherwise it will stick. Wait a couple of minutes and mix again. 9. Meanwhile the sauce will start bubbling and, depending on your kitchen, you may need to mix it. If you see large discrepancies in texture, definitely mix. Otherwise don't. If it becomes too dry, add some water from the cooking pasta to the sauce. 10. When the chronometer is at cooking_time_on_pasta_packaging - 2 minutes, take a glass of water and fill it with water from the pasta pot. Dry the pasta, and put it in the pan with the sauce. Make the heat level for the pan a bit higher. 11. Cook it until "al dente", that is still a bit hard at the inside, but not completely. If the sauce dries too much (it should, if not turn the heat higher), add the water you kept in the glass. This step is where science stops and art begins: you need to calibrate your taste to your desired results and in turn calibrate water and heating. During all this step, mix your pasta in the same direction continuously. This is called "risottatura". Taste the pasta while cooking often. 11. Take everything off the fire, serve, add parmisan. Edit: look at maccard comment for water and salt because I don't recall the right quantities. After a while you go by eye. Edit 2: preventing more comments on oil, that is merely my very limited experience and I'd say, as a rule of thumb (not incontrovertible truth), that if you like your oil alone with bread it is a good oil.

2-718-281-828 4y ago

and the secret spice of any sauce is ... sugar. yes, I'm very sorry. thank me later

maliker 4y ago

Someone introduced me to making red sauce by basically just cooking tomatoes for as much time as I have, and it's now my go-to red sauce. Really amazing how good just well-cooked tomatoes are. https://www.seriouseats.com/frankies-tomato-sauce-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/frankies-tomato-sauce-recipe

bckr 4y ago
+1 just for the link to Serious Eats. If you have a recipe in mind to make, look it up on Serious Eats. Their MO is to give you ideas on how to level up each recipe (compared to food network or similar) and explain the principles behind the techniques.
- kristjansson 4y ago
  And really do look them up. In my experience they've completely lost the SEO game, so SRPs are not a reliable entry point to their (wealth of) content.
moffkalast 4y ago
Well that should also be how they make tomato sauce you buy in the store, it's just filtered so you don't get seeds and large pieces of peel in it.
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  You can reduce the olive oil/salt for a lower-calorie/sodium version which is good for weight loss/high blood pressure

throwaway743 4y ago

And if you're making a red sauce, simmer a little anchovy paste or a couple anchovies (till they melt down) first with bay leaf, olive oil, and garlic before adding anything else into the pot. Broken up kalamata olives, basil, and onion are good around that point/shortly after too. And when you add in the tomato puree (or your preference), add a tiny bit of sugar. If the sauce looks like it has a sheen, it's ruined. Just a tiny amount will do. Do this and your sauce will taste 10 times better. Not a fan of anchovies, but you won't even be able to tell.

yamtaddle 4y ago

Relatedly, I spent far too long cooking my pizza sauce, treating it like other red sauces. You can just mix tomato sauce, oregano, salt, and pepper, then slap it on the pie. It cooks in the oven. No need to pre-cook it. [EDIT] unless you're gonna use it for dipping. There's a reason places have a separate "marinara", often, for that purpose. Even giving your pizza sauce a quick simmer will make it a lot better for dipping. Raw pizza sauce is... palatable, but not great, for dipping.

moffkalast 4y ago

> Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce Risotto would like a word.

gpderetta 4y ago
You still don't soak risotto, you keep the liquid content within limits. Also different rices.

sllabres 4y ago

Heat your plates (e.g. with the cooking water) and rub dry to prevent your your delicious meal get cold too soon. This is of course not only good for pasta.

bob1029 4y ago

> One trick is to crush the garlic and let the oil it's in carry the flavor. I usually sauté garlic in oil separately, discard the garlic and then use the oil as a sort of super garlic flavor concentrate. I used to believe the actual ingredients were ~80% of the puzzle of cooking. I now believe they're closer to ~20% for most cases. The process you follow is way more important than anything else. Just take a sweet onion for instance. The difference 2-3 minutes makes in a hot pan is incredible. If you simply chopped it up and threw it directly into whatever, you will wind up with something that tastes substantially less flavorful.