Chapter 474: Pasta

Pasta, also known as spaghetti, is the closest thing to the eating habits of Chinese in Western food. There are many types of spaghetti www.biquge.info Bi, Qu Ge, each with its own name, and its hollow type is called macaroni by some Chinese speakers.

As for the origin of spaghetti, some say that it originated in ancient Rome, and some say that Marco Polo spread it from China to all of Europe via Sicily. As the legal raw material of pasta, durum wheat is the hardest wheat variety, with high density, high protein, high gluten and other characteristics, and the pasta made from it is yellow, resistant to cooking and has a good taste.

Pasta varies according to the type and shape, and in addition to the straight flour that the Chinese consider to be noodles, there are also hundreds of screw-type, elbow-type, butterfly-type, hollow-type, and shell-shaped noodles.

Pasta is mainly divided into dough making and sauce making.

When edible dough first appeared, it was made by pressing the dough into a thin sheet of paper, covering it over food and cooking it in an oven. Later, people thought of cutting the dough into small pieces or sticks of elongated noodles, and the Arabs thought of drying the noodles for storage.

In addition to the original noodles, other colorful noodles are made with a mixture of fruits and vegetables, such as saffron noodles, black cuttlefish noodles and egg yolk noodles.

People in southern Italy love to eat dried spaghetti, while fresh pasta is more popular in the north. In general, spaghetti is mostly used as a starter, seafood spaghetti is served with white wine, and red wine is served with a thick sauce.

Authentic ingredients are essential for pasta to taste good. In addition, the sauce used to mix the pasta is also important.

Pasta sauces can be divided into red sauce and white sauce, red sauce is a red sauce based on tomato, white sauce is a white sauce made of flour, milk and cream, noodles flavored with olive oil, vanilla sauce made with herbs, pesto sauce, and dark sauce (squid-ink sauce).

Red sauce is a sauce made mainly from tomatoes, and it is currently the most common.

Pesto is a sauce made from basil, pine nuts, olive oil, etc., and its flavor is special and rich.

White sauce is a sauce made mainly from unsalted cream, and is mainly used for baked noodles, lasagna and seafood pasta.

Dark sauce is a sauce made from cuttlefish juice, which is mainly served with seafood pasta such as cuttlefish.

The flour used in pasta is different from the flour we use to make noodles in China, it uses a kind of "hard durin wheat", so it is not mushy after cooking for a long time, which is the biggest difference.

Authentic pasta is very chewy, that is, half-cooked and a little hard bite, for Chinese who are used to Yangchun noodles, most of them are not used to eating. The point is that when the pasta is boiling hot, you must first add a teaspoon of salt, which accounts for about 1% of the water. Of course, adding salt can also make the texture of the noodles firmer and more elastic, and another step is to make the noodles retain their strength after blanching, do not use cold water, but mix a little olive oil or cooked corn oil. At the same time, if the scalded noodles are not used up, you can also mix the olive oil and let it dry slightly before refrigerating.

The world of pasta is a kaleidoscope of variety, with at least 500 varieties of pasta, and a combination of sauces that can be used to make thousands of pasta, making it a staple food of Italy.

The origin of pasta is simply that some people claim that it originated in China, was brought back to Italy by Marco Polo, and then spread throughout Europe.

Some people also advocate that in order to solve the problem of a large population and difficult preservation of food, the Roman Empire came up with the clever idea of kneading flour into dough, rolling it into thin cakes and then cutting it into strips and drying it, thus inventing the famous delicacy - PASTA (pasta).

The earliest pasta was formed around the 13th and 14th centuries A.D., and is most similar to the pasta we eat in the 21st century. After the Renaissance, the variety of pasta and sauces gradually became richer along with the arts.

The first pasta was kneaded and cut in this way, cut and dried, and when eaten, it was made in the oven along with meat and vegetables, so many cities on the Italian peninsula were full of people making noodles and drying noodles in the streets and squares of many cities on the Italian peninsula. It is said that the longest noodle is 800 meters. However, because pasta was originally a product of food shortage, it was favored by the poor, but its taste soon became irresistible to all classes.

Pasta tastes quite inconvenient with juice and water. In the early days, people used their fingers to scratch it, and after eating, they licked the ten fingers dipped in juice without exhaustion.

In the Middle Ages, some upper-class people found it indecent to eat like this, and racked their brains to invent a fork that could roll noodles on four forks and put them in their mouths. The invention of the dinner fork is considered to be a sign that the Western diet has entered the era of civilization. In this sense, pasta is indispensable.

The discovery of the New World opened up the imagination and brought more variation to pasta: two plants imported from the Americas, peppers and tomatoes, were introduced into the sauce.

The advent of tomatoes and subsequent improvement of varieties made them popular in Napoli, Italy, for the first time as a sauce and with pasta, and even royalty and aristocrats were attracted to it. Authentic spaghetti is made from pressed copper molds, and due to its thicker and uneven appearance, it is easier for seasoning sauces to stick to the surface, resulting in a better taste and texture.

By the end of the 19th century, pasta's famous three sauce systems: tomato, whipped cream and olive oil were fully formed, with a variety of seafood, vegetables, fruits, and spices to create a complex and varied sauce flavor. The noodles themselves are also varied, with various shapes such as elongated, flat, spiral, butterfly, etc., and are made into colorful varieties by adding pumpkin, spinach, grapes, etc. According to statistics, there are as many as 563 varieties of pasta. But who would have thought that spaghetti was first kneaded with the feet? Because the dough is so big, I can't really knead it by hand.

It wasn't until the 18th century that King Ferdinando II of Naples, who was hygienic, hired a craftsman to invent the kneading machine.

In 1740, the first noodle factory was built, and the scene of drying noodles in the square became history. Italians' love for noodles seems to be innate, and many people put aside their unique recipes for noodles and refuse to show them easily, even writing pasta into their wills. Noodles were mentioned in many operas and novels in the Middle Ages. Garibaldi, a modern Italian national hero, also rewarded the three armies with noodles, and even Napoleon used "noodles" to boost morale during the Po River March.