Daily Dose of English 135
Pasta
Daily Dose of English 135
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to, well, every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about pasta. Pasta one of the one of the amazing foods of the world it's Spread pretty much everywhere. You can find pasta in basically every supermarket in some way It's definitely taken over the West, I would say. I don't really know how else to phrase that, but pretty much every single like Western country I can think of has pasta as a basic food because it's very cheap, it's delicious, and yeah. And I wanna talk a little bit about pasta today because despite it being sort of basic and cheap, it's actually incredibly vibrant and delicious and versatile. There are so many different things that you can do with pasta, whether you make it fresh or you get dried pasta and you do different things. There's so many different pasta dishes. And so I figured that we talk a little bit about it today. So the first thing that we can talk about is the kind of the default standard pasta that you get is dried pasta that you can find at grocery stores and supermarkets. And that pasta has been dried, right? That's why it's called that, but it's also in different shapes. And that's the first choice you have to make, right? If you're gonna buy pasta, what shape should your pasta be in? And there are a lot of different shapes for pasta based on kind of what it's used for. And that's something that's actually interesting. The shape matters, not just because of how it looks, but also because of the texture, how quickly it cooks, and how it interacts with sauce. And I think that's the most important part. That is the most important part. How does the pasta interact with the sauce that you're going to have it with? because if you have a really chunky sauce that has bits in it, so like a ragu, for example, is a meat sauce, and so there's usually big chunks of meat in it that you can't really, that are almost not sauce-like, right? And so you want a pasta that can more easily kind of grab on to that meat. That meat and so something maybe that has like holes in it or is a bit large that has like empty space is good but like something like pasta or sorry spaghetti or Alfredo fettuccine, that's the name So spaghetti or fettuccine isn't very good for ragu because the pasta is gonna or the sauce is gonna fall right off. I But other sauces like really thick, whatever, cheesy sauces are gonna fit a lot better with a fettuccine, right? Fettuccine Alfredo is super duper famous because of that, right? The sauce really connects and hooks onto the pasta really, really well. And so in your bites, you get a lot of pasta and sauce without missing either of them, I guess. And so pasta shape is quite important. And so you have to choose wisely. It's not like the end of the world, right? It's gonna be pasta, whether you get the right shape or not. But having a shape that fits better with your food is just nice, right? A good example is that for making a pasta primavera, which is sort of basically a bunch of vegetables in a pasta with a simple sauce. which is very good by the way, but you want a pasta that is going to be about the same size as your vegetables, because that way everything is relatively similar. Because it doesn't work very well with spaghetti or fettuccine like I said, it also doesn't work very well with really small pasta like orzo or, you know, like elbows, I could kind of work with elbows, or macaroni is another name for it. But I think the best one is probably like bow ties or penne is also really good for it. There's also the squirrelly penne, which I don't know what it's called. But yeah, those are good ones to have with pasta primavera because the pasta ends up being about the same size as the vegetables. Then there's the whole process of actually making the pasta and there's a bunch of tricks to it. For example, there's a... I guess it's a well-known way to check if pasta is done by seeing if it sticks to the wall, by throwing it at the wall and seeing if it sticks or the ceiling. Don't do that, that's ridiculous and it doesn't actually help you know if the pasta's done. If you wanna know if the pasta's done, taste it. Test it with your teeth and with your mouth and see if it is the right texture yet. I see a lot of people who set timers for their pasta, but I haven't set a timer for pasta in, years, probably in like five to 10 years, I haven't set a timer for pasta. I don't need a timer for pasta because I test it and I just know when it's done. If you want to set a timer to remind yourself to test it, that's fine, but you should trust your own instinct on when you're making pasta, when you're boiling pasta. However, you might have to train your instinct a little bit because you don't want to get your pasta too overdone. If you leave it in the water for too long, it's going to be too soft and it can be kind of mushy. And you don't really want mushy pasta. You want nice firm pasta. Uh, the, the phrase that is used is al dente, um, with a nice American pronunciation. And that translates to, to the tooth, basically. And the idea is that there's just a little bit of bite to the pasta. When you bite down, there's a little bit of resistance. It's not completely soft. If you look inside the pasta, there's like a little tiny circle usually in the middle that is like still a tiny bit raw. And this means that that's good thing because first off the pasta will continue to cook just a little bit in the sauce and on your plate. And it also means that there's more texture to the pasta and it just is better. It's more delicious. I've had home-cooked pasta by an Italian before and she left her pasta very al dente. There's definitely different preferences for different people, but my recommendation is to leave it just a little bit, like a minute before it's done or whatever. And oh, and then the last thing about cooking pasta is to make sure that you reserve some of the pasta water. So you save just a little bit of the water that you cooked the pasta in with enough salt, I hope. And that way, because this water has a bunch of starch in it. It has starch from the pasta, from the flour in the pasta that sort of soaks out. It also has the salt that you put in there. And it usually ends up being this very useful cooking tool. One of my favorite pasta dishes is cacio e pepe, which is just pasta, Parmesan or pecorino cheese, pecorino's better, and then pepper, and then salt, I guess, because you're making the pasta with salt. But it's just those four ingredients. But the magic is that the cheese, the pecorino, as it melts and combines with the pasta water that you put in, it turns into this kind of sauce-like texture. So you don't just have melted cheese or just water, they combine to make what's called an emulsion. And an emulsion is where fat is mixed into water, which is usually hard to do, but that's what creates thick salad dressings, or in this case, a nice sauce. And it's a really good example of technique on pasta making. And so if you're interested in a challenge in the kitchen, try making Cacio e Pepe. It's very good, it's simple, four ingredients, and you probably have three of them in your house already. Or you might have to get pasta, but yeah. And so, yeah, that's sort of what I have to say about making dried pasta. But I also wanna talk a little bit about making fresh pasta. Because I've made fresh pasta a lot of times in my life and it's very good. If you haven't had fresh pasta before, I highly, highly recommend trying it at home. It's also actually quite easy. The only difficulty is rolling it and cutting it into pieces. like pastas, I guess, but I'll get to that in a second. So making pasta fresh just really involves salt, a little bit of oil, and then flour and eggs. Egg pasta is the easiest to make at home. You can do others, but I'd recommend fresh egg pasta. and you can look up the recipe like exactly how to do it online but you basically just make a dough out of the eggs and the flour and a little bit of salt and oil and then you let it sit and then you roll it out into a very flat sheet of pasta dough and then cut it. I have a pasta roller so I have a little machine that does it. I turn the handle and it turns some things and it rolls and cuts the pasta right so it's not that fancy. They're like 30 bucks on Amazon if you want to get fancy with it and they're fun. I think it's a really great experience. And it's also delicious. If you make it with just a good sauce, oh, it's so nice. But you can, I've also done it before without the machine. It's not even a machine, it's a metal thing. But all you have to do is roll out the pasta very thin, so you can use like a wine bottle, a rolling pin, whatever you have. And then you can make it into smaller sheets, so you should cut it into like, about the size of a sheet of paper. Then you can roll it up and then, and then just cut it with your knife into thin strips. And that also works as pasta. Definitely watch a video on it if you want to try this, but I would highly recommend it. It's very good and everybody that I've shown fresh pasta for the first time has been like, wow, this is really good. So try it out. But that's all the time that I have for this episode on pasta. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a few things and potentially are inspired to make some fresh pasta at home. But that's everything for me today. Have a fantastic rest of your day. See you then, bye.
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