COOKING
Cooking, but like, Proper
before this year, I knew how to cook the way most people knows how to cook, heating up canned sauce and mix it with a cheap pack of pasta, or cooking a piece of chicken breast really dry but still edible. I won't let myself starve, but it was all simply for the necessity.
How I started
This culinary passion came from the most random of places: At the tail end of last year, I started a habit of listening to podcasts while studying. I was once listening to this episode of The Armchair Expert podcast, in which guest, actor Stanley Tucci shared his love for the Italian food. it apparently compelled me so much, that I started watching Mr. Tucci's Italian cuisine / travel documentary: Searching for Italy. Stanley Tucci visits each Italian region, exploring the best of local cuisine and restaurants, aginst the backdrop of the beautiful land and people of this country. As much as I love Stanley Tucci and the movie The Devil Wears Prada, This is in no way the most in-depth guide to the food and culture, nor does it contain the most thoughtful culinary critic, but the show somehow makes a good introductory, that simply ignites your desire for something more, something better.
I have no money to travel to the likes of Bologna or Naples to experiences these Michelin star dinning experiences myself, at least not yet, therefore I made it my quest to become good at cooking these fine Italian dishes. Being trained under a engineering program, I decided to approach this in a systematic way, and focus on one type of dish at a time, and examine the commonalities shared across each variations under the category.
Pasta
Its clear how pasta, among a few, have become synonymous with the Italian cuisine Its all about a few simple and quality ingredients done right, packing flavours larger than the sum of those ingredients. I'm a true believer that nothing represents and encapsulate a culture better than its food, and American-Italian pasta dishes aren't gonna cut it. It seems to me that traditional Italian recipes I started I found that every kind of pasta dish follows the exact same structure, it goes something like this:
Emulsifier?
The essence of Italian pasta cooking, or the trickiest part, is about emulsifying the pasta sauce. Note that unlike American-Italian pastas, traditional Italian pasta achieves a creamy sauce without the use of cream, and with the exception of Northern Italy, without butter. The secret lie in this one word, "emulsification", a common culinary terminology, describing the mixing of water and oil. This techique allows you to get a consistent creamy texture, make possible not just pasta dishes, but also sauces like the french Hollandaise, a butter and egg york emulsion, and similarly, the french mayonaise. Because in general water and oil don't mix, an emulsifier is needed to hold this unlikely union stay together, and the sauce stay consistent. Pasta water, containing starch released from boiling of the pasta, it turns out, is the perfect emulsifier, and it is this secret ingredient, that made this whole concept of pasta possible.
Its fasinating that most classic Italian pastas shares the same structure, once I started to see this underlying connection, recipes for pasta become unnecessary, as long as you know the ingredients, you know where each ingredient fall into place, while the process and techique of cooking is shared across all pasta. Here's some examples:
Pasta alla Bolognese
Oil: olive oil
Aromatics: onion, celery, carrots, pancetta
pasta: fresh egg tagliatelle
emulsifier: pasta water only
cheese: parmigiano reggiano
other: ground beef, crushed tomatoes
Carbonara
Oil: olive oil, guanciale fat
Aromatics: guanciale (sort of)
pasta: dry spaghetti / spaghettoni
emulsifier: egg yorks, pasta water
cheese: pecorino romano
Aglio e Olio
Oil: olive oil
Aromatics: garlic, parsley, (chilli pepper)
pasta: dry spaghetti
emulsifier: pasta water only
cheese: parmigiano reggiano