Italian pasta is a versatile dish that will never get bored. Indeed, thanks to various seasonings, from one type of pasta, you can cook a new culinary masterpiece every day and never repeat it.
Pick your recipe
Whatever the pasta, it is just the basis of the dish. To prepare it, you need only 2 seasonings - table salt and olive oil. Moreover, if with the salt most of the cooks do the right thing, namely, they fall asleep in boiling water before sending the pasta there, then many make a big mistake with butter. There is no need to pour oil into water. If you follow the rules for the preparation of pasta, usually given on the packaging, namely, take at least 5 liters of cooking liquid 500 g of pasta, nothing sticks during cooking. Moreover, adding oil to water increases the boiling temperature of the latter, which contributes to the digestion of the paste, leading to a deterioration in its taste. It is enough to sprinkle a little pasta with a couple of drops of olive oil just to get a simple and tasty dish.
But you can shade its taste by adding various spices. The most popular in this regard are aglio e olio and olio e peperoncino, that is, oil with garlic or chili. And it is possible with that, and with another. It is enough to chop a couple of cloves of garlic, fresh chili pepper, mix them with olive oil, and the universal seasoning for Italian pasta is ready. Moreover, you can store such a seasoning for several weeks, so it will be enough to spend 5 minutes a month on its preparation.
But a favorite addition to Italian pasta is still spicy herbs. Add them in different ways. You can sprinkle the finished dish with chopped herbal mixture, you can put a couple of basil leaves on the edge as a decoration, or you can, imagining, make your own green seasoning. But why reinvent the wheel, if everything has long been invented. Namely - pesto. Raw herb sauce invented by the ancient Romans and still considered one of the best seasonings for pasta.
The most popular variety is considered to be Genoese pesto - Pesto alla genovesa, which includes basil greens, pine pine seeds, garlic, olive oil, rock salt and grated hard cheese. Sicilian pesto - Pesto alla siciliana, which additionally contains sun-dried tomatoes, is slightly behind him; pineapple seeds are replaced by almonds, and the amount of basil is reduced by about half. But the Calabrian pesto - Pesto alla calabrese - is characterized by a more acute taste, achieved by adding black pepper and chili peppers.
In addition, almost every Italian village has its own version of this seasoning. Somewhere instead of basil they take wild garlic or arugula, somewhere in the base add mushrooms, olives, cilantro and other ingredients.
Among other seasonings, oregano, rosemary, savory and capers can be called the most suitable for pasta. Due to the intensity of taste, they are rarely used in their pure form, but as a flavoring additive to various sauces - cheese, cream, tomato, they are indispensable. It is their aroma that turns an ordinary tomato sauce into the famous Salsa napolitana, one of the ten most seasoned with pasta.