Online Newsletter February 2010 – Pasta's Great New Category

To ensure delivery of DEAN & DELUCA e-mails please add dean.deluca@deandeluca.com to your address book or safe sender list.
Having trouble viewing this email? View this email in HTML or TEXT format.

Let's get things straight, right off the bat: I LOVE dried pasta. Spaghetti, linguine, farfalle....it's all good. Italians LOVE pasta in a box. Anyone with taste loves pasta in a box. Is it as good as freshly made pasta? Well, it's...just....different. "But yeah," the nagging voice persists. "IS IT AS GOOD?" Truth be told, pasta fresca, fresh pasta, made with soft wheat and eggs, at its glorious just-made best, is the top rung of the pasta ladder. But, and it's a big but, very rarely do we in America get a shot at GREAT fresh pasta. Sticky and glue-y is the order of the day, without the springy resilience that fresh pasta is known for in Italy. For me, 99% of the time in America, dried pasta beats fresh pasta.

That's why I'm so excited about a new category of pasta that is developing in our market. You could call it a kind of hybrid: it's dried, all right, made with semolina wheat (as dried pasta always is), but also includes eggs like fresh pasta does. Cipriani, for example, a great producer of this hybrid pasta, uses 7 eggs in every kilo of pasta, working the dough through their machines at least 30 times (most commercial pasta gets worked once or twice) to get that springy texture of great fresh pasta. To gild the lily, they then dry this pasta at extremely low temperatures.

The result, from Cipiriani and others? A dried pasta that is surpassingly delicate, cooks quickly (some shapes take only 2 minutes) and has the resilience of great fresh pasta with just a little more chew! I am ga-ga over this stuff, which no one is talking about as a new pasta category. I urge any Italophile (and who isn't one?) to break into this amazing category as soon as possible!

Here are some brands and shapes that pleased me mightily in a recent tasting of dried egg pastas, along with preparation ideas:

Cipriani Pappardelle Extra Thin Egg Pasta

Cipriani is the gold standard in the dried-egg-pasta category, and their long, graceful pappardelle ribbons (each one 10" long by 1/2" wide) are all that's great about the category. This pasta is absurdly light, feathery even--and yet presents a real chewing opportunity to your teeth. I love it in as simple a preparation as possible: just toss with melting butter, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, a little pasta cooking water, and you have a dish worthy of a top Italian restaurant.

Cipriani Tagliarelle Egg Pasta with Spinach

This is my second favorite in Cipriani world: long strands, a bit narrower than the pappardelle ribbons, fixed in a lovely light green. A big bonus here is an actual hint of spinach: there's an earthy, umami-like taste, and an aftertaste (just like spinach) of oxalic acid. I love these noodles tossed with a relatively delicate version of Bologna meat sauce, or Ragu Bolognese.

I am not normally one for "flavored" pastas (or "flavored" anything for that matter), but my heart was won by this terrific product from Abruzzo. The deep gold color and the wiry, semolina-flecked strands impress immediately--even more so after cooking (I recommend undercooking), when the resistant chew combines with saffron-y richness for a mouth explosion. I love this pasta with creamy seafood sauces; lobster is ideal!

La Piana Linguine with Squid Ink Egg Pasta

Finally, this jet-black pasta with a distant hint of the sea provides a very light chew, not a wiry-resilient one. This pasta works ideally with simple, quick-cooked, garlicky marinara sauces.