Cook Perfect Pasta & Master Italian Sauces

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi, I'm Steve, and this is my Skillshare course on how to make the perfect plate of pasta. We're going to take you through every single step of the process from picking the right pasta for the job, how to cook it absolutely perfectly, how to match it with five of the most popular, most recognizable Italian pasta sources. All the tools that you need for the job and how to bring the pasta and the sauce together as something greater than the sum of their parts to make something really, really delicious. Like with anything else, it's super important to reinforce what you're going to learn throughout this course by practicing. It's through practicing and cooking that you're going to figure things out like what your pasta is meant to feel like when it's done cooking. The consistency that your source should be, how the source and the pasta are emulsifying together and how to not get a source that's too watery. Through practice, you will instill these things inside of you. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] For your class project, what I would like you guys to do is just dedicate one night per week to a pasta night. Cook a plate of pasta for yourself and the loved one, for whoever, it doesn't really matter. But what's important is that you document the process. Take a picture with your smartphone and just write a few lines about where you thought you did well, where you thought you didn't, any resounding successes, any terrible disasters. I would like you to post that in the Projects and Resources section just below this video. I will then come in and give you my feedback, some criticism. Tell you where you did really well. Hopefully together week after week will help you guys build the confidence to make a really incredible plate of pasta. You can pick any recipe that we're going to be covering inside of these videos. I'd like you to start there. Once you're developing some real confidence and if you're good about the dishes of pasta that you're making, I would also be more than happy to help you guys attempt some other dishes that perhaps are a little bit more difficult or things which we haven't covered in this lesson. I want to help you make the best plate of pasta possible. [MUSIC] 3. Choosing the Right Pasta: [MUSIC] Before you even start cooking though, one thing which you do need to consider is the type of pasta which we are going to be using. This will make an enormous difference, not only flavor and texture of pasta, but also in the consistency of your finished source. For the purpose of this course, we're only going to be dealing with a dried pasta. You can substitute fresh pasta for a number of these recipes. However, dried pasta is a lot more likely to be inside of your home kitchens already. A lot of the recipes which we're going to be covering were designed to be cooked with dried pasta. When you're choosing your pasta, there are essentially two categories that you're really looking at. A more easily produced pasta and a more commercially produced pasta. To explain this, let me first explain how dried pasta is made. It all starts off as a dough made up of durum wheat flour and water. This is mixed together to create quite a firm dough, and then it's pushed through a machine called an extruder. Now, this extruder will have little tubes at the end. In the more expensive artisanal produced pasta, these tubes are made of bronze and have little ridges, whereas, in the more commercially produced pasta, these tubes are a little bit smoother and produce very smooth pasta. As you can see here in the more artisanal produce pasta, that the ridges and the bronze they leave for a really interesting texture on the edge of the pasta. Whereas in the more commercially produced pasta it's a lot smoother. When the artisanal easily produced pasta, these ridges are very important because number one, they hold onto source really well. When you mix them, the source and the pasta together, it'll just have more space to sort to. But additionally, when you're cooking your pasta, the more artistically produced pasta will give off a lot more starch inside of the water. For reasons we'll get to a little bit later, this is one of the most crucial steps to making a really incredible creamy source. Another main difference between the two pasta is how they are dried. The more artisanal produced pasta is dried much slower at a lower temperature, whereas commercial pasta is typically dried at a higher temperature for a shorter period of time. The main difference over here is that in the lower, slower drying process, you maintain a little bit more flavor to the pasta. Having said that, you do not need to spend an arm and a leg on a really expensive brand of pasta. You will find loads of readily available pastas that have been made using these bronze die and dried out at a lower temperature. Just look for trafilata al bronzo written on the packet. That's a good indicator that you're getting a pretty good brand of pasta. Now that you know what you're looking for when you're picking a pasta, let's talk about how to cook it. [MUSIC] 4. How to Cook Pasta: As a general rule of thumb, you're going to want to cook your pasta in salted boiling water. Past that point, there are a number of choices which you can make. Let's start by seeing which pot you're going to use for the jobs. Conventional wisdom would dictate that you cook your pasta in lots of salted boiling water. You're going to want a nice large pot, so your pasta has plenty of space to move around without getting stuck together. On the other side of the spectrum, we have people who would suggest cooking in as little and amount of water as possible. Some even cooking pasta in just a frying pan with just enough water to cover. The advantage that this has is that there's going to be such a large concentration of starch given off by your pasta and lit inside of that pasta water, which would help you make a really delicious sauce. Having said that, I find this to be a little bit risky, I've done it before with great results, but I've also had other times where I've had pasta stick to the bottom of the pan. I've had points where it was a little bit too salty. I go for these Goldilocks in the middle, medium-sized pot where I have enough space to put additional amount of pasta, just enough water to cover it so that things don't stick together and they have a little bit more insurance with the amount of water inside of the pot. I find this to be my best bet. But having said that, if you're doing anymore than let's say three maximum four portions, you are going to want a nice big pot. Now that you have a good idea of what pot you're looking for to cook your pasta. There's three things that I want to work towards. We want to make sure that the pasta doesn't get stuck to itself as it cooks. We want to make sure that it's very well seasoned, and we want to make sure that the texture is absolutely right. to make sure that pasta doesn't stick to itself, the most important thing that I would suggest is as soon as you've added your pasta just give it a good stir for the first minute or so, and then to give it an occasional stir as it's cooking along, what this is going to do is make sure that when the pasta gets into the water and the start to gel, they don't get the opportunity to sort next to each other long enough for this gelling to merge them together. Something which I do seen people doing, and I continually get asked this in the workshops that I hold, "Should I add oil to my pasta water, " and to this I say, no. This does absolutely nothing besides it creates a little oil slick and waste some olive oil on top of your pasta. This doesn't really do much for it's sticking together at all really. Secondly, we want to make sure that our pasta is well-seasoned and something which I'll hear a lot is your pasta water should be as salty as the sea. Not really, seawater is on average about 3.5 percent salt. Well-seasoned pasta water is a number between 1 and 2 percent salt depending on how salty like your pasta. To give you an idea, 1 percent would be for every liter of water, you add 10 grams of salt. I tend to prefer something around 1.5 percent saltiness. It's just to my taste. As a general rule of thumb, if you don't want it to weigh out your pasta water, what I would recommend is give it a taste through the spoon. If it tastes like a well-seasoned soup or broth, then that's probably an absorbed for your palette and for your taste. Lastly, you want to make sure that the pasta is cooked through well. To do this, you want to cook it through a point which the Italians referred to as al dente, which means worth of too firm to the tooth. It has a nice bite to it. Don't misunderstand this. You don't want it to be raw. You don't want crunch on pasta. That's not a particularly nice texture, but you want it to have a good chew. You don't want mushy pasta inside of your mouth. Now to do this, what I would highly recommend is number 1, to cook your pasta to a couple minutes before the recommended instructions on the back of the packet of pasta. If it says cook for 13 minutes, cook it for 10 minutes, give it a taste and see where it's at. At this point, you can probably drain it and continue cooking it inside of the pan. But that's a process which we'll get to it in the next lesson. 5. Perfect Pasta Secrets: [MUSIC] Finishing the pasta inside of the sauce is one of the most important steps that you can do when cooking pasta. I know myself personally when I grow up, my idea of a plate of pasta was fresh liquid pasta with a dollop of sauce just placed on top. This is what pasta looked like in cartoons. This is how my grandmother served it to me, unless I didn't know any better. However, when you take your pasta that's slightly under cooked, add it to the sauce along with a couple of liters of that lovely starchy pasta water. As you cook it down, the starch is in the pasta water are going to emulsify or combine with your sauce to make something really creamy and luxurious. You can add things like butter and cheese to help make that even more creamier and luxurious. But as you'll see in some of the recipes we'll be covering today, you just don't need it for a really luxurious sauce. To give you an example, the spaghetti vongole or spaghetti with clams has no real dairy but the sauce is just so creamy and luxurious by the end of it. [MUSIC] 6. Tools of the trade: To make the perfect plate of pasta, you don't really need much in the way of tools. But there are a few pieces which will make your life both a little bit easier and make the result of your pasta a little bit better. Let's start with the pots that you're going to be choosing. We've already touched on this slightly, but it is super useful to have a nice assortment of different shapes and sizes of pots. I like a nice medium-sized one when I'm just making pasta for myself and my girlfriend. Whereas a larger pot would be useful if we have larger batches, but also for making large batches of sauce. Let's at the middle of summer. Tomatoes are in season and you wanted to make an enormous batch of tomato sauce. Having something like this will come in handy and if you are making a much smaller batch of sauce however, let's take just enough for a couple of plate of pasta. I would recommend something like this. It has a little bit of a frying pan shape but has nice high sides so that any source that you're making, any pasta that you're finishing inside the source, you won't have splatter everywhere all over your kitchen. Much prefer this to a frying pan, but you can get the same done with a regular frying pan. Once you're done cooking your pasta, what's important is you want to make sure that you have access to plenty of that fantastic pasta water that has been cooking in. My two favorite tools for this job would be a measuring cylinder. Because you can simply dip it into the pasta water, pull it out, and that is drain off the pasta and you still have a nice reservoir of pasta water and alternatively, you can grab some pasta water with a little spoon that out and use that as you need it. Once you've pasta is cooked, you want to see how to drain that pasta. If you've already gone through the trouble of setting some pasta water aside, you don't really need much more and for that I would grab a colander and just drain the pasta water out in to the sink, grab the pasta and continue cooking it as normal. But what I'll often do is straight off my pasta through a sieve, something like this, and collect the pasta water inside of a regular mixing board. Make sure the mixing bowl is large enough to contain all the pasta water that you have. I'll place the pasta side of the pot, continue cooking it and using a little spoon in and just add pasta water for my mixing bowl. I'll do this when I'm not sure exactly how much water I need, just so I can adjust as necessary in small doses. There are a few smaller pieces of equipment which would really come in handy so for mixing your sauces and actually emulsifying the sauce and the pasta and pasta water together, I like either a rubber spatula or a firmer or the wooden or just heat proof spoon. I like the spatula because it's nice and bendy. You're not going to sort of cut off pieces of pasta with something like a sharper spoon or something like that and it's really good for getting all of that sauce from the outside of the pot. The firmer spoon is very handy we're actually making the sauces. When you use that and let's say our [inaudible] is coming up to scrape off all those delicious pieces of crispy meat from the bottom of the pan. Super useful. If I am mixing sauces with a little longer pasta let's say something like a spaghetti or [inaudible], I'll opt for a pair of tongs because I can really grab that pasta toil round and give it a nice mix. I much prefer a silicon finish on the edge of my tongs just because without it, sometimes you'll clip off little pieces of pasta and just break them down into smaller pieces. It doesn't look as nice. It doesn't eat as well. The next tool which I find super useful is a nice chunky serving spoon. Even if I have a little pasta and I'm serving it to the pair of tongs, a good size spoon is really useful for grabbing any excess sauce from the bottom of the pan and spooning it on top of your pasta. This also comes in handy when you have smaller pasta or even like tortellini, that you'd like the spoon and the delicately place on a plate. However, if you do have a lot of people that you're serving and a fairly easy pasta to serve a lid is going to do a really great job at quickly serving plenty of pasta out. Now that we've served our pasta, let's talk about finishing touches. One thing which I think is very important is having freshly grated cheese on your pasta. Never buy pre-packaged cheese. They tend to add and non caking agents to it with nothing sticks to itself and that just messes with the way that the cheese melts. If you're adding cheese to your pasta or even just sprinkling it on top, grate it maximum the day before, a few hours before, ideally fresh and straight into it and for that I would recommend the grater much like this one, it has a really nice finish which allows for very quick grating and also a very fine grating. If all you've got is a box grate like this, this will do just fine. It can just be a little bit fiddlier to grate cheese directly over what you're doing. But this also does a fantastic job. Last but not least, our final finishing touch is pepper. Now the Italians don't use an enormous amount of ****** inside of their cooking. But one thing which they do use frequently is pepper and then a number of these recipes which we're going to be covering, pepper isn't just a seasoning. You're not just cooking something and you use salt and pepper. Pepper is an integral ingredient in things like a [inaudible]. This is a main flavoring agents do a dish. You are going to get a lot more flavor out of freshly ground ****** rather than pre ground ****** and a lot of pre-ground black pepper is also very fine. It'll have a weaker flavor and it's going to be distributed a lot more evenly across your pasta. Why that may sound like a nice thing. Having a little bit of a course or grind to your pepper gives you these really nice little pockets of peppery flavor and freshly ground just tastes way better so it's highly recommend one of these. Before I forget, I would lastly recommend getting a decent weighing scale. These things aren't very expensive and it's going to be really helpful for you to, Number 1, follow along with the recipes which I'm going to be including. But also you're just starting out and you're not sure how your pasta water should taste. It's very easy to find out concentration which you like by just using a weighing scale. Now that we've covered how to pick the right pasta, how to cook it, how to bring your pasta and the sauce together and the tools that you need to do so we can jump into the sauce recipes. [MUSIC] 7. Pasta al Pomodoro: Our first recipe is going to be a pasta with tomato sauce or pasta al pomodoro. This is a really simple recipe, but that doesn't make it any less valuable in your culinary repertoire. This can also be used for a number of other amazing Italian pasta dishes, all'amatriciana, pasta alla norma, these are all things which start with a pasta al pomodoro as a base sauce. Today's sauce is going to be made with fresh tomatoes. It's the middle of summer and tomatoes are absolutely delicious. What we actually want to use from this is just the flesh and the seeds from the inside. We're just going to cut the tomatoes in half and we're simply going to start grating them. You just want to hold this flat against the grater. You want to use the largest hole settings on the grater. You want this to be quite a course puree. When this cooks down, the membrane will break apart, the flesh will dissolve and it would be one cohesive sauce. We're going to continue flavoring our sauce with a few simple ingredients. Garlic is a key one that you're going to find in most recipes like this. We're going to start by slicing the garlic and to do that, I like to take a little bit off the end, so that little root end. Give the garlic a gentle tap with the side of my knife, and then it's going to peel off the outside. If you notice over here, there's a small little green shoot sticking through. What that is, is the germ of the garlic. What I always like to do is cut my garlic in half, and all you're going to do is pinch that off because this does add a little bit of bitterness to the finish dish. These don't need to be absolutely perfectly shaped, but I do like having a nice thin even uniform size as long as what you are preparing is nice and uniform, it just means that it's going to cook at the same time. For the last little bit of knife work that we're going to do is just to shift nad or finally slice a couple of basil leaves. We're going to use these for garnish towards the end of the dish. I'm going to add some directly to the pasta when it's almost done cooking. Then we're just going to sprinkle a little bit on top, both for the visual aspect of it as well as that really nice, fresh basil flavor. The reason we're not going to be adding these in the beginning, number one, their welts tend to become brown, but also their flavor with dissipate relatively quickly. What we're going to do is to infuse a little bit of that basil flavor inside of our dish is use the stem. I'm going to set aside my stem for now and I'm going to grab a couple of these bigger, beautiful leaves. I'm going to bundle these up almost like a little cigar shape, lay this down flat on my board and I'm going to get a nice thin slice of them. What I've done here is gotten a pan and place it over a very low heat to start preheating. Over here I'm going to start with about three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. I'm going to go ahead and add this sliced garlic. I only want to cook this until it just starts to brown a little bit around the outside. That's when I'm going to go in with the peperoncino, the red pepper flake. Now we're going to go in with our harder hubs. This is going to be the rosemary, pop that in a couple of day leaves as well as the stick, the stem of that basil plant that we had before. Now that our garlic is starting to brown likely around the outside, it is a great time to go ahead and add our tomato. Once you've added the tomato, that garlic is going to stop cooking, start browning, so it won't burn. Just give this a really nice mix and season with a good pinch of salt. What you want to do at this point is cook your tomato over medium heat. It gently reduces over a short amount of time and you're left with this really nice sauce consistency with a very fresh tasting tomato flavor. Whilst your source is nicely simmering away, this is a great time to get your pasta water on the hub and add about 1.5 percent salt to it. For our selection of pasta today, I've gone for casarecce. I really like these guys because they have lots of little nooks and crannies that will hold on to that tomato sauce really well. For these, what I'm going to do is cook these for about three minutes less than the package instructions dictate, just because I want to keep them a little under cooked and finish cooking them inside of that sauce. As soon as you add your pasta, you're going to want to give things a little bit of a mix. At this point, we can redirect ourselves to finishing of our sauce. I want to get it to the point where I can drag my spatula through it and that sauce doesn't pull it back down to the bottom of the pan. You want like a nice tight sauce. At this point, it's also a good time to remove the rosemary, the basil stem, and the bale eaves. Our pasta is almost completely cooked. It has maybe another 2-3 minutes until it's done. What I'm going to do is strain it with a hold on towards that lovely starchy pasta water. Then I'm going to continue cooking my pasta inside of the sauce. Soon as I've added my pasta to the sauce, I'm going to go ahead and add one nice big liter full of pasta water to the pot. Now that our sauce has reduced to a really nice consistency and is clinging to the side of our pasta, I've gone ahead and turned off the heat. I'm going to add a little bit of our chopped basil and I'm going to wilt this into the pasta. This will help to usher the flavor, another really nice basil flavor. As you can see, the sauce is clinging really nicely to the side of my pasta and that is the added advantage of cooking your pasta inside of the sauce. Just going to go ahead and finish this with some some grated pamajoran and a little bit of chopped basil. There you have it, pasta al pomodoro. 8. Bucatini Carbonara: [MUSIC] For our next recipe, we're going to be making pasta carbonara. This is a Roman classic made with cheese, guanciale, eggs and pepper to make this beautifully creamy sauce. There isn't any actual cream inside the finished dish. This texture is achieved by combining an emotion with the pasta water, the cheese, the egg cooking ever so slightly. Everything coming together to coat the individual pieces of pasta for a really lovely, luxurious texture. For today, we've decided to go with a combination of cheeses. We're going to be using 50 percent Pecorino Romano, which is a sheep's milk cheese from Rome, salty, sharp characteristic to it. Then we're going to be combining that with Parmigiano Reggiano, which is from further north, and that is a cow's milk cheese. An ingredient which some of you may not be familiar with, this is guanciale. It's a cured pork product and similar to something like bacon or a pancetta. Except this comes directly from the jaw of the pig, the pig's cheek. A point of note about the black pepper was this does seem like a fairly mundane ingredient. It is a key component inside of the carbonara. Therefore, I would highly recommend to get a pepper mill. You don't need anything super fancy and freshly grinding your black pepper. For our sauce, I'm going to start by grating the cheese. We're going to start with equal parts Pecorino and equal parts Parmigiano. To make my life a little bit easier, I have set my mixing bowl up over a weighing scale so I can keep an eye on how much I'm grating. For this very important you just want a nice finally grated cheese. The finer the cheese is grated means that it's going to melt and emulsify to the source a little bit easier. Next we're going to be adding the eggs. To get a really nice creamy fatty luxurious finish, we are going to be using primarily egg yolks, as that's where most of the fat is found inside of the eggs. The whites are primarily water with a little bit of protein. We're going to be doing three yolks and one whole egg. To separate your eggs, you're going to give them a gentle tap against a fairly firm surface. I like to separate them and use the shelves, go back and forth and drain off the white. You can add the yolk directly to your cheese. I'll do about 20 or so cracks of black pepper. For the guanciale, I'm actually just going to take a little bit of the top. Sometimes you buy them with the skin left on intact. You'll definitely feel that it's hard to cut through, but this also doesn't really render down or melt particularly well inside of the pan and so it's going to cut that off. I've gone from about 80 grams for two people. For this, I'm just going to cut it into long buttons and cut them into little strips. Just because I feel like that eats better with a long pasta. For our next step, we're going to cook the guanciale. This is pretty much the only real cooking that we're going to need to do for the sauce. To do that, we're going to place the guanciale in a low pan and we're going to start rendering out some of that fat. Whenever you're looking for much of a sizzle as we add it, because we do want this to be a nice slow process. As you can see here, a lot of that white, fairly opaque fat is rendering down and starting to become [inaudible] This is exactly what we want. We don't want the process to go too quickly or the outside of the crisp pop before the fat gets a chance to melt away. We want everything to start crisping up inside of that fat, not just from the heat from the base of the pan. This may take five minutes if you're patients enough, but it's definitely worth it in the end. Now that the fat has rendered out nicely and we have quite a generous pool of fat that the guanciale is cooking in. I have turned up the temperature ever so slightly, just to start getting a light crisp on the outside. We're looking to completely drown the guanciale, but we do want to develop a little bit of color. Now that we have a good amount of some crispiness to the guanciale, a nice color, I'm going to go ahead and strain off that's that. While the guanciale is cleaned down, we're going to go ahead and focus on our pasta. For the pasta today we've gone with a bucatini which is a long pasta, but it also has the added advantage of being a tubular shape and that there's a little hole on the inside, which is great because it's going to hold on to so much more sauce. I'm going to go ahead and add this so nice big part of salted boiling water. As soon as I add these to the pot, I'm just going to give them a little bit of a mix around just so that they don't stick together. I'm going to go ahead and grab a small measuring cylinder. We're going to need probably about 100 milliliters for this, but I like to keep a little bit extra just in case I need it. We're going to set that aside for our sauce. Next, I'm going to go ahead and add my guanciale fat, about two tablespoons. This looks close. I'm just going to go ahead and add most of it. Then I'm going to give the egg yolks, the egg whites, the pepper and the cheeses a nice mix until you get this almost like a yellow cheesy paste that you're working with. Here. I have my drain of pasta. I have my egg cheese mixture ready to go, and I have my pasta water set aside. What I've done here is I've returned my pot to the stove with just a little bit of water underneath. We're going to use this to gently provide some steam to the bottom of the bowl, which will have gently cook the egg and the pasta together to make this like a sauce. Add the pasta to the egg mixture, I'm going to add a little splash of water, and now I'm just going to start coating the pasta in the egg mixture. As you can see, it's slowly but surely starting to coat the pasta. I'm going to go ahead and add my guanciale. We're going to set this up with a little bit of a cloth just to stop the sides of the dish from getting too hot. You just want to keep rotating and cooking that egg until you have a nice sauce consistency. If you feel like the pasta is drying out a little bit, it's okay to add a few more drops of pasta water. Now that our pasta is nicely coated. Everything's nice and shiny. It looks super silky, luxurious, and we don't have any of that watery egg mixture still at the bottom. I'm going to go ahead and serve. Now I'm going to finish off with a couple more pieces of guanciale. To finish the dish, I'm just going to grate on a little bit more cheese and to finish, a couple of more grindings of black pepper. There you have, Bucatini Carbonara. [MUSIC] 9. Ragu alla Bolognese: [MUSIC] For today's lesson, we're going to be taking a look at the Ragu alla Bolognese. This is a personal favorite of mine and it's super popular all around the world. Originally, Ragu alla Bolognese was this really rustic braised meat source that's made use of a lot of cuts that we may not use nowadays. Things like alfalfa, braising cuts, that thing. Nowadays, it's a lot more common to see it made out of something like minced meat, which there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But for today, we're going to do a little combination of the two. The foundation of our dish, the starting point is going to be a soffritto. In Italy, a soffritto is a combination of finely diced onion, carrots, and celery. You want to cut your vegetables quite small. With the onion, it doesn't matter as much because it tends to break down and almost melt quite easily, but you want to try and avoid large chunks of both celery and carrots. In this recipe, I'm going to be adding a little bit of rosemary sometime and some bay leaf. They all add a really nice aromatic component to the dish. Not enough that it becomes overwhelming, but enough that they just seasons the meat really nicely. Just to avoid having to pick out individual twigs and leaves from my braise, I just like to tie them with a little bit of string just to secure them. For that, I'm just getting a standard piece of kitchen tie and using the size of the bay leaves as a wrapper for it, bundling my rosemary and tying together and just securing with string. For a soffritto, I have a pan preheated on a nice medium low temperature. I'm going to add about two tablespoons of olive oil to that and then I can go in with all my bench. [NOISE] Then as soon as this hits the pan, you want to hit it with a little bit of salt. This is going to help pull the moisture outside of the vegetables and concentrate their flavor. You want to adjust the temperature depending on how fast the vegetables are cooking. You want to hear really light sizzle to the pan. If the pan seems a little bit too dry for the amount of vegetables you've added, feel free to add a little bit more oil, but try not to go overboard because the meat is going to provide quite a lot of fat to the sauce anyway. While that's cooking off, we're going to go focus on our meat. For the meat part of our Ragu, we're going to start with the minced component. We have a little bit of minced meat, but we also have these lovely Tuscan sausages. They're very simply spiced. It's just salt and pepper. You don't want something with too much of a strong flavor. I do, however, like using a cured meat product to add flavor to the minced component. Our pan is preheating nicely. Just going to add a little bit of olive oil to it and just start breaking off the sausage. I've gone ahead and remove the casing ahead of time, so just break this off by hand and just place like tiny little rough meatballs in the bottom of the pan. We are going to be breaking this up with a spoon so that they're less like whole pieces and they become part of the sauce. You don't overcrowd the pan too much. But do keep in mind that's a decent amount of fat will be rendered out from this, so they will shrink slightly. [NOISE] Now our meat is nice and brown and the sausage is crumbled up quite a bit. I'm going to go ahead and spoon this out of the pan. It's given off quite a lot of its own fat, which is full of loads of really good flavor. Instead of taking everything out and adding more olive oil to the pan before I cook my minced meat, I'm going to leave some that rendered sausage fat inside of the pan, just to add more flavor to this next part. I've put my pan back on the heat. We're going to raise that tie again. I'm going to go in with my minced next. Some of their pans are nice and hot. If you're starting to see the lightest wisps of smoke, we're going to go in with our minced meat. Go ahead and season this with a little pinch of salt, pretty much as soon as it hits the pan. [NOISE] Now that my minced is nice and brown, I'm going to remove that from the pan and we'll get ready to add our nice braising cut of meat. I've gone ahead and seasoned this pretty well. I've also seasoned from a height just to make sure that the salt is evenly distributed on a piece of meat. I've got the pan preheating over a very high heat over here. When you're braising anything, what's important is that you get a really good sear on it. I'm going to go ahead and add some oil to the pan and lay this nice piece of meat away from me. Press down slightly to make sure that the meat is making good contact with the pan. I want to get as good a sear as possible on this on to get some really nice browning because that's going to lead to a lot of flavor later on. Now that meat is nicely brown, I'm going to remove it from the pan. We're going to check the bottom of the pan to see if we've developed any fond, which is the brown, crumbly sticky pieces of meat that stick to the bottom of the pan. I'm going to deglaze the bottom of the pan with plenty of white wine. I'm going to let the wine reduce a little bit, just there isn't too much raw wine and then I'm going to add that to the rest of my meat. Now that that soffritto is almost done, and we've pretty much finished off our meats, I'm going to go ahead and add a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste. You want to add this to the middle of the pan and just let it cook out for a minute or two, just to take off that raw edge. Once the tomato paste is cooked out, you can go ahead and add your sausage and your minced meat to the pot and let the juices from the meat start reducing. After that, you can go ahead and add your chicken stock. Now that our stock is at the nice simmer, I'm going to go ahead and add our meats to the pot and just make sure that everything is nice and submerged. I'm going to add that little bundle of herbs that we added before. Just make sure that that's nice and submerged as well. I'm going to season with a couple of shakes of black pepper. Now that our parts come back up to a boil again, I'm going to place it into an oven and let it cook low and slow for a good couple of hours. Our meat has been in the oven for about three hours now. I pulled it off and everything was super tender. We went for long enough, just until the meat came nicely off the bone. What I have here is all of that delicious braise meat, that we let cool down inside of the sauce itself for that in a small Tupperware container left inside of the fridge, just so it's nicely chilled. All I'm going to do is push it down a little bit, just compress the flakes. You're just going to chop this into small cubes. This would break up a little bit more throughout the cooking process once we mixing it with all the pasta and it just becomes this really wonderful, luscious sauce that sticks to the pasta. I've gone ahead and added all that lovely chopped up braised meat to the rest of the meats that we have. It's inside the pot over here, and I've just warmed it through to see how much of residual liquid we had. You want it to be fairly nice and saucy, but you don't want it to get too soupy and stewy, otherwise you're not going to have a nicely reduced sauce. As far as our choice of pasta, we've gone with tagliatelle. What's great about tagliatelle, it's a nice wide noodle and it's what's typically consumed with Ragu and this and others wide noodles like it. This is an egg noodles, so slightly different to what we've been using before, but it is dried nonetheless. Now I'm going to go ahead and add the Italian tagliatelle directly to the water and mix as I add it. Again, I'm doing this in a very low volume of water. I don't want an enormous amount of water to go with this because I want my pasta water to be as concentrated in starch as possible. At this point, my pasta is almost cooked. I'm just going to take it off the heat. Give it a little bit of a strain. We're going to hold on to all that lovely pasta water. [NOISE] I'm going to add the pasta to my sauce. Now I'm just going to go ahead and add a nice little foil of pasta water. To finish the sauce, one more thing I want to add is a little bit of butter. The butter is going to make everything very creamy, very rich, very luxurious. You just want to give this a mix, coat them with the sauce and just heat up until your sauce is reduced and your pasta has cooked too. Now, our sauce has finally come together. It's reduced nicely and everything is coating the pasta really well. Now, the only thing that's left to do is plate. [MUSIC] Then just optionally finish with a little bit of grated cheese. Here we have Ragu alla Bolognese. [MUSIC] 10. Pesto alla Genovese: [MUSIC] For our next recipe, we're going to be making a pesto alla genovese. I didn't just say pesto because the word pesto itself is a general catch-all term for a pounded sauce in Italy, whereas the pesto alla genovese is probably the one that you know and love and it's going to be a combination of lovely fresh picked basil leaves, we have some pine nuts, black pepper, olive oil, some nice quality Parmigiano Reggiano, and some garlic. We're going to pound or grind those together to make this lovely green, delicious, fresh, vibrant sauce. The sauce is typically made in a pestle and mortar, which is a really great way of making especially smaller batches of the sauce depending on how big your pestle and mortar is, but I like making large batches and as you can see, my pestle and mortar isn't exactly huge. Whilst I do love this method, today, we are going to be resorting to a blender. You can use a food processor and immersion blender, anything to get the sauce mixed. What I will say, if you are going to be using a larger electric piece of equipment, like a blender or a food processor, make sure that you make the sauce quickly. Don't let it spin for too long and it will become very, very smooth and sometimes you want a bit of texture, but you'll also heat up. Through heating up, you should deteriorate the flavor of the basil, the color a little bit. You want the process to be quick. We're just going to start by preparing our ingredients. Since everything's going into the blender, there isn't really too much that we need to prepare. Start with the garlic. I just takeoff the root and give them a confident tap with the side of my knife and the skins should just peel straight off [MUSIC]. You don't need to chop these too too fine because the blenders went through quite a lot of work, but you don't want to just put it in a whole clove of garlic because it might not get broken down too well. Now that the garlic is done, I'm going to go ahead and grate all of our cheese here. You might be able to get away putting this in as a bigger chunks if you have a powerful enough blender, but I'd just recommend grating it to be sure. For the actual blending portion of the recipe, I just go ahead and add everything straight to the actual blender itself. I've named this recipe a couple of times. If this is the first time that you're making it, maybe add a little bit over the time and just taste regularly. We're going to start with the garlic, that goes on the bottom of the blender. [NOISE] Now for the pine nuts, you can toast them if you want, but the flavor of untoasted pine nuts is really nice as well. [NOISE] I'm going to add my basil. [MUSIC] Top with my cheese and generous amount of black pepper. I'm going to start off with most of the olive oil and then I'll drizzle in the rest just to adjust the consistency and see where I'm at. I'm not going to add the salt to just yet because the parmesan itself is quite salty, will probably need to add a pinch or two, but we'll determine that later. Once you've done blending, you want to check for consistency. You're looking for something that's not super smooth. A little bit, of course this is nice for the finished dish. You do want to check for a seasoning, so give it a taste and see if it needs a little pinch of salt or not. Once you're done with that, you're going to put everything in a small container and keep things inside of the fridge until you're ready to use. For our pasta today, I've chosen fusilli. What I love about these guys is that the little spiral is make it so that they hold onto sauce really well. Each little byte is just packed or different lovely pesto that we've just made. We can go ahead and start boiling it. We can go ahead and add the pasta and cook it for pretty much, maybe one minute less than the package instructions tell you. We give these a bit of a mix just so they don't stick together. Some now that our pasta is cooked pretty much exactly where I want it. I'm going to go ahead and strain it and hold onto all that lovely pasta water. [NOISE] Now to this bowl over here, I'm just going to add a couple of tablespoons of our pasta and mix that with a little bit of pasta water, maybe like 50ml for now. Go ahead and add our pasta. [NOISE] Now, you're just going to mix until you bring everything together. You want to coat those fusilli really nicely with the pasta. You're pretty much done once the liquid at the bottom would have been absorbed into the pasta and everything is just really nice, vibrant, basil green. [MUSIC] Once everything's come together nicely, the only thing left to do is serve. This is delicious hot but equally as delicious cold, served like a pasta salad with something. I would recommend serving with plenty extra great parmesan, a couple of grinds of black pepper. There you have pesto alla genovese. [MUSIC] 11. Spaghetti Vongole: [MUSIC] Making a spaghetti alle vongole or spaghetti with essentially a really nice clam sauce. It's a very simple sauce to put together it's in the style of [FOREIGN] We're going to have garlic and chili cooked down in some olive oil until we get the flavor nice and extracted in that olive oil. Then we're going to go ahead and add our clams directly to the pan, add some white wine. One One important note since the clams are the star of the show it's imperative that they're super fresh and that they're good quality clams. If you go to your fishmonger you smell them and you're like, "I'm not 100 percent sure about these." Make something else for dinner. The clams are the star of the show and they need to be great quality for this. We're going to start with the garlic, you want this to be chopped into just slices it's perfectly fine. Next, we're going to slice some chili. Now what I like to do with the chili just because it's quite hard to tell just how hot it's going to be. I'm just going to take a little bit off the edge, I'm going to taste that. It seems relatively mild so I'm probably going to do about half of it. But obviously, increase or reduce that depending on your taste to chili and depending on the people you're serving it to. Last but not least, the last little bit of prep that we need to do is just chop some parsley leaves. This is going to be a garnish at the end. I like breaking them down a little bit because I'm going to be folding some into the sauce. Now that we've got all our ingredients prepped and we're ready to cook. You just want to make sure that you have everything that you're going to need easily available at hand. What do I mean by that? I've got my pan and I've got a lid for it so that the clams can steam well. I've got a bowl here so that as soon as the clams are cooked I can remove them. If you let the clams steam in there for too long since they're very small pieces of meat they're going to overclock, they're going to dry out and they're just not going to be as nice. I'll start off with your olive oil and once you see it start to shimmer and you can smell it, you can go in with your garlic and your chili. [MUSIC] You can see the garlic start to cook, you don't want to take this too far you essentially just want to infuse the oil nicely. At the very edge of my garlic, I'm starting to see a little bit of brown so I'm going to go ahead and add everything. [NOISE] [MUSIC] Our clamps have been cooking for maybe about two minutes now. As you can hear they're sort to open so I'm going to take a look at them and remove the ones which have cooked. [NOISE] It's good to give them a little bit of a mix so that the ones which are at the bottom in direct contact with the pan go to the top and vice versa. [NOISE] We're starting to see a couple that are opening I'm just going to pull these out so they don't overcook. Now that all of our clams are cooked I have removed them from the pot pretty much as soon as they were cooked they're still nice and clamp and juicy. What I'm going to do is using some gloved hands because these are quite warm and I don't really touching all the food. I'm just going to remove the clams from the shell and reserve their meat and get rid of most of the shells. I'll save a few in the shell to use as garnish for the actual plates. But I like the fact that I can pick up a nice spoonful of the spaghetti with a couple of pieces of clams on it. These are very easy they come out super simple you just pinch them out. You can use a spoon if you want but I find this to be much faster, and since they are freshly cooked shellfish you don't want these to be sitting out for far too long. In fact, you could probably do this process in the time it takes you to actually cook the pasta. Now that we've pulled our clams out we've gotten most of the meat off and we've reserved some of the clams inside of their shells we are ready to start cooking the pasta. Spaghetti is typical with this dish, linguini also but I've gone for a Spaghettoni which is nice and thick because there's a really nice bite to it I think it goes really well with the clams. I'm going to keep this moving until I can submerge them in their entirety. I want to keep this to a very limited amount of water because all the starch in there is going to make a really nice creamy and delicious sauce over here, and because we don't have too much besides white wine, a little bit of olive oil and some aromatics all that starch is going to be super valuable for getting our sauce together. [MUSIC] You have to make sure you keep these moving just so they don't stick together and you're going to cook them for let's say two minutes less than the recommended cooking directions on the back of the packet. We still want these to be a little bit more al dente than we would like because we are going to finish cooking them inside the [inaudible] sauce. Now that our pasta is almost completely cooked I'm going to strain it, and we're going to finish cooking it inside of the clam cooking liquid. [NOISE] Add the spaghetti directly to it. You're not going to add the clams just yet because we don't want to overcook them, we don't want to agitate them, so once the sauce has almost completely come together we'll add those and we'll add the parsley. But what I will add is a nice little fall of this really nice starchy pasta water. [NOISE] We're just going to cook this whilst mixing it until it comes together and becomes this really nice, creamy, rich sauce. At this point, our sauce looks really nice and creamy. It's been reducing from maybe like two minutes now because there was quite a little bit of liquid in there. It's not completely there yet if was going to be able to see the bottom of the pan and the sauce looks thick. I'm going to go ahead and add my clams so they can warm through, [NOISE] and I'm also going to add a little bit of parsley saving some to garnish at the end. [NOISE] Now that there is no liquid left at the bottom of the pan and our sauce is really nice and tight and creamy, and the only thing left to do is plate. [MUSIC] There you have spaghetti alle vongole. [MUSIC] 12. Conclusion: We've taken a look at how to make the perfect plate of pasta through five very different and characteristic Italian recipes. We've gone all the way from a pesto, which takes absolutely no cooking whatsoever, all the way to arugula, which simmers away for three plus hours. By seeing these very different recipes, you'll not only have the skills to replicate these, but also to replicate a large number of different recipes that use the same techniques and the same principles. I'm going to need to get cooking, though. Get in the kitchen and start taking pictures and writing down your commentary on the pasta dishes which you're cooking for your project and leave those in the Project Section. If you have any questions, comments, anything like that, feel free to ask away in the Discussion Section and I'll do my best to respond. Thank you so much for watching and I look forward to seeing your progress towards making the perfect plate of pasta. [MUSIC]