7 Mistakes Italian Cooks Would Never Make In The Kitchen
Ever wonder why Italian food tastes so much better in Italy? It’s a combination of factors, aided in no small part by the delight of consuming Italian specialities at their source: eating fresh seafood in a quaint coastal village, digging into a steaming plate of polenta in a cozy Alpine hut, or savoring handmade pasta at a busy sidewalk trattoria in Rome — of course it’s going to taste better.
But it’s not all about the ambiance. There are methods of cooking in Italy that either never made the transatlantic leap or somehow got lost over the 150-plus years since the first large-scale waves of Italian immigrants began arriving in the U.S. Written recipes and cookbooks likely weren’t among the scarce baggage they brought with them, explains Judy Witts Francini, an Italian food and culinary history expert who’s lived in Tuscany for more than 40 years, as such a large percentage of immigrants of the Italian diaspora were illiterate — especially women. “Recipes were rarely written down,” she explained, “because so few Italian immigrants could read or write. So many of the ‘secrets’ of a nonna or auntie’s cooking were lost over time.”
That lost knowledge, plus an absence of the grown-close-to-home ingredients once available in Italy is what brought us to … unlimited breadsticks and heaping piles of chicken alfredo at Olive Garden. And it’s what’s led to so much insipid or overcooked or over-garlicked Italian food in American homes and restaurants.
But I’m here with some course-correction. Since I moved to Italy and became part of an Italian family 15 years ago, I haven’t become a great cook. But I am a great observer and asker of questions. And according to the Italian home cooks and cooking experts we spoke with, if you avoid these mistakes in how you cook and consume Italian and Italian-inspired cuisine, your food will taste a lot better — even if it’s not quite as good as at that little trattoria on the Amalfi Coast.
Mistake 1: Rinsing the pasta.
For Italian cooks, rinsing pasta is unheard of — I still recall my Italian husband racing to the sink to stop me the first time I cooked pasta for him and started to run it under the faucet.
Francini explains that before there were a variety of brands and qualities widely available, store-bought pasta in the U.S. gave off a lot of starch. “That’s why Americans got used to rinsing their pasta. But with the availability of better-quality pastas, rinsing is not necessary when you spend a little more.” Sauce will bind better to pasta that hasn’t been rinsed, and some recipes, like cacio e pepe, even call for adding a little of the pasta water to the sauce.
Mistake 2: Adding too much garlic.
When Italian Eva Santaguida visited an Olive Garden for the first time and her husband Harper filmed it for their popular Pasta Grammar YouTube channel, she had … some thoughts, especially about the amount of garlic in the food.
“Tomato sauce should taste like tomatoes,” Santaguida said, “not like garlic.” Garlic bread, not to mention those unlimited breadsticks, doesn’t exist in Italy. “We sauté garlic in olive oil, then take it out when it’s golden brown,” Francini said. “It’s not like you walk down the street here and smell garlic on everyone’s breath.”
Garlic salt, the ubiquitous spice of many kitchens in the U.S., isn’t popular in Italy either. Nor are recipes that combine onion and garlic, said Santaguida. “We use one or the other. Otherwise you have two strong flavors that compete with each other.”
Mistake 3: Being stingy with the olive oil.
As I shared with HuffPost readers a few years ago, Italian cooks really pour on the olive oil. It’s the vehicle that makes a pasta sauce emulsify and cling to all those pieces of pasta, and it imparts loads of flavor — all the more reason to buy the good stuff.
“Kirkland’s Italian olive oil is a perfectly good pantry oil,” Francini said, noting that the olives are of Italian origin. “If it’s grown in Italy, it’s probably better for you,” she added.
Newly pressed olive oil, if you can get your hands on some, has a particular bite that mellows over time, and it’s especially good for bruschetta. But please, pour it on, don’t drizzle!
Mistake 4: Using poor-quality ingredients.
See items 1 and 3. A big reason Italian food tastes better in Italy is that they use quality ingredients, and, thanks to EU regulations, their store-bought food has fewer additives and preservatives.
“When ingredients are mass produced, they have less flavor,” Francini said, “and when there’s less flavor, you add more things to give them flavor. My mother-in-law used to say, ‘Spend more time shopping and less time cooking.’”
Canned vegetables are another no-no. “I never saw canned green beans or asparagus until I came to the U.S.,” Santaguida said. “If we use green beans, they’re fresh. That’s why we don’t eat green beans in January.”
Mistake 5: Putting cheese on everything.
“In Italy, we really don’t use as much cheese as Americans do,” Santaguida said. Instead, when cheese is used in a dish, it’s usually incorporated, rather than melted on top, which Santaguida says “smothers the dish,” and covers the flavor of what’s underneath.
The list of foods in Italy that aren’t served with extra cheese sprinkled on top might surprise you, and includes pizza, bruschetta, virtually all seafood dishes and many pastas. By contrast, Santaguida has noticed that in Italian restaurants in the U.S., “the food is already full of cheese, and they’re always offering more!”
Mistake 6: Overcooking the pasta.
When I first moved to Italy, among the culinary horrors I forced my husband to endure: a bowl of plain pasta, served with a few dollops of sauce on top. He looked at it with the most confused expression, and of course he did, because you’d never see pasta served that way in Italy.
That’s one of the reasons Italians stop boiling pasta when it’s still at the al dente stage — because it’s tossed in with the sauce, where the two entities are entirely mixed together and where the pasta finishes cooking. If you cook it to the point that it’s soft and limp, it’s going to cook even more once it’s in the sauce. And at that point, you can just gum it, rather than chew it.
Mistake 7: Not keeping it simple.
When it comes to cooking, the biggest lesson I’ve learned from my Italian family is that less is more. Dishes prepared with a few quality ingredients don’t need much of anything else. Bruschetta (the “ch” is pronounced like a “k”, so bru-sketta), for example, is just toasted bread topped with olive oil and salt — at most, it’s got some garlic scraped over it or is served with fresh diced tomatoes. Extra toppings, heaps of cheese, loads of diced garlic … it’s just not necessary.
“You don’t have to take everything in the fridge and put it on a pizza,” Santaguida said. “That might work for soup, but not for pizza!” She holds the same grudge against portions of meat served over pasta: “Chicken parmesan on spaghetti? Steak on pasta? We don’t ever do it.”
