Why do some food writers insist on using fresh pasta when others recommend dried?
Dave, Manchester
While pasta would seem at face value to be the very definition of peasant cuisine – at its most basic, it’s just flour and water, after all – there’s more than a touch of snobbery at play when it comes to fresh pasta.
“There’s a misconception that fresh pasta is somehow ‘better’ than dried,” says Tim Siadatan, chef and co-owner of Padella in Borough Market, London. “But the pasta is always – and I mean always – the vehicle for the sauce. It’s the sauce that dictates what type of pasta, and what shape, you ought to use.” And that’s from a guy who runs a fresh pasta phenomenon that makes 300kg of the stuff every week (“We all have one arm like Popeye’s”) and where punters happily queue for up to an hour for a plate of his pappardelle with eight-hour Dexter ragù (an import from Siadatan’s other restaurant, Islington neighbourhood tratt Trullo) or Insta-friendly pici cacio e pepe.
As Feast’s Rome correspondent Rachel Roddy explains, some pairings can be explained by the simple physics of a certain sauce just fitting with a certain pasta: “Buttery sauces work better with soft flour-and-egg pasta, whereas olive oil-based sauces go more with flour-and-water pasta,” she says. There’s logic behind it, too. “Spaghetti with big chunks of cauliflower doesn’t work, whereas spaghetti with clams does.”
Local habits and produce also have a bearing. “A smooth, butter-and-gorgonzola sauce, say, goes best with eggy noodles,” Roddy adds, “while a chunky, southern Italian aubergine sauce isn’t the same on anything but dried pasta spirals.”
These unions are tried and tested, and have strong roots in the regional and national psyche, but as Siadatan points out, much also depends on what you’re looking for in the finished dish. “It’s impossible to get properly al dente pasta when you’re using fresh,” he says, “because it’s so soft and giving.” Take that classic British cultural appropriation, spag bol, otherwise known as stewed mince: “Of course, it’s still delicious with fresh tagliatelle,” Siadatan says, “but it’s really not the same as when it’s served on dried spaghetti – it doesn’t feel quite right. If, however, you had a slow-cooked sauce using similar ingredients but with larger pieces of meat, like our pulled beef shin ragù, the texture of the sauce lends itself more to wide ribbons of soft fresh egg pasta, which is why we serve it with pappardelle.”
Even in Italy, where there’s at least one fresh pasta shop, or pastificio, in every town, the stuff is not so much an everyday ingredient as a once-a-week treat for those who can’t be faffed to make, say, ravioli from scratch at home (and who can blame them)? As the food scholar Oretta Zanini di Vita, author of Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way, notes, over-thinking pasta is never a good idea at the best of times, a take with which Roddy agrees: “Oneupmanship is so at odds with the generous, family-centric spirit of a bowl of pasta. And anyway, at the end of the day, it’s your pasta, so you can do what you want with it.”
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