faq

True Italian advice comes unsolicited. Sometimes, though, people ask first. Here are the answers!

What’s the best brand of pasta I can buy at a regular grocery store?

Generally speaking: anything marked “bronze die,” with a rougher grippier texture, is going to be good. Pretty much everything in Italy is made this way, but there are also lots of great brands that are easy to find in the US.

If you feel fancy: Rustichella D’Abruzzo makes the best long pastas, particularly the spaghetti alla chitarra, which is hard to find and something special; Seggiano is a specialist of hard to find oversized shapes. Both of these are available at Whole Foods. Pastifico di Martino is a great one made in Naples available at Whole Foods as well as Kroger chains. Molisana and Garofolo are my preferred from Amazon. Sfoglino, Semolina, and Severino are all great US-made choices of Italian quality; I have a special place in my heart for Semolina, which is woman-owned and made locally to me in Pasadena, California (the other two are east coast).

For everyday, I like Whole Foods 365 brand, DeCecco, and DeLallo for their range of shapes and texture. Kroger’s high-end private label brand, Private Selection, is also really good, and they sell Trottole, another hard to find shape I love for mac and cheese.

And of course, anything sold at Eataly will inevitably be outstanding, which it should be for $7 a bag.

What kind of cookware do you recommend? What should I use when?

You really don’t need a ton of matching cookware, tbh. So don’t buy sets—the pieces tend to be worse quality / seconds and many of the sizes are worthless for everyday cooking. I also reach for different materials depending on the task, so sets just aren’t very practical.

Enamel cast iron I use for heavy-duty cooking: braising in the oven for hours, blasting steaks with high heat, slow-cooking sauces, making embarrassingly large batches of soups. Ceramic nonstick is great for medium-heat, low key cooking: eggs, wilted greens, quick-seared chicken and fish, reheated leftovers—anything that’s a pain to clean up after but that doesn’t need to get ripping hot, which will cause the coating to peel off. Clad stainless is my go to for pasta dishes of all kinds (can boil, put the drained pasta back in, and build a sauce right there in the same dishwasher safe pot!), skillet meals that go stove-to-oven, and brothy soups that require a large volume of liquid.

DM me on Instagram if you ever want cookware advice!

Uhh, Instant Pot doesn’t sound very ~Italian~ of you.

Why do I need one?

I am generally anti-electric cookware. “Warmed” food isn’t the same as cooking. Slow cookers are easy-bake ovens for adults. But the Instant Pot is different. There are two reasons I love mine.

One: it’s not fast, but it’s faster. Long, slow braises are great on a Sunday. But sometimes it’s a pork collar ragu kinda night on a Friday. In that situation, the Instant Pot makes it possible to have nice tender shreddy meat in 2 hours all-in, not 5. Your house will still smell like garlic and grandmother.

Two: there are certain things it actually does better than I can do on the stove. Chicken soup, for example, is a recipe I learned on the stove. But because broth is prone to boiling, and boiling = tough chicken, it takes near-constant babysitting to prevent it from overcooking your meat. Under pressure, this doesn’t happen. Water on the stove boils at 212°. The Instant Pot raises that — it won’t boil til much, much higher. As a result, things don’t boil in the Instant Pot, even at the same high temperatures. This means more tender meat, non-cloudy broth, and softer vegetables that keep their flavor.

PS - my Italian grandma was all about the pressure cooker. She just did it on the stove and lived in fear of it exploding like a sauce bomb all over her ceiling. The Instant Pot is traditional, just better! If she were alive today, I’m confident she’d at least entertain the idea.

How do you make sauce that can pass as restaurant sauce?

The theme here: it’s actually not hard, just a little more work. Four great tricks to try:

Use a skillet and don’t use as much water. I boil my pasta in the shallowest container that will fit it typically, which concentrates the starch in the water and makes the sauce “bind” better. This is extremely helpful for dishes like cacio e pepe or carbonara, where starch water is a primary ingredient and therefore the more you have, the better.

Add pasta water to the sauce before you serve. I know, everyone knows this. Saving sticky, starchy pasta water can be annoying, but it’s truly necessary. Sauce gets glossy, shiny, and magical when you cook almost-done pasta in it over low heat with extra pasta water.

For tomato sauces, add extra fat and blend. I learned this recently by accident, but it’s been a thing for awhile. Adding a little olive oil to a nearly-finished tomato sauce, then hitting it with a stick blender, emulsifies the entire thing and makes it creamy and shiny, without adding any cream. It also mellows out the flavor. You can do this with butter, too. It also means you can chop your garlic, onion, etc. a little rougher, or use whole canned tomatoes, and still achieve a buttery-smooth sauce.

For sauces requiring an emulsion, go slow. If you dump a huge pile of pecorino into cacio e pepe, your result will be a cheese brick semi-attached to pasta. Add a little bit of pasta water, a little cheese, fully toss with your pasta, and repeat!