One of the reasons I signed up for cooking classes is my desire to serve authentic Italian cuisine to my family. We are all lovers of all things Italian, especially Italian food, and, unsurprisingly, our favorite is pasta. However, I’ve found that the best chefs don’t use dry or store-bought pasta. So, I went on a mission to learn how to make fresh pasta from scratch. When I was finally cooking pasta dishes that I made with my own hands, I was able to see the benefits of using it fresh instead of dried.
Here are just a few of the benefits I’ve discovered from using fresh pasta:
– If you want a more delicious and light pasta, you can get it from the one you prepared yourself. Because you can cook your pasta immediately after making it, the effect is that you will have a lighter pasta that can be cooked in a relatively shorter amount of time compared to dry.
Cooking any Italian pasta dish with fresh pasta will also ensure a better flavor to your recipe. This is because the one you make at home can absorb the flavors of the sauce better than the dry ones that are much heavier. The lightness of your pasta will allow it to absorb the essence of ingredients such as seafood, meat, cheese, olive oil and tomatoes, among others.
– Any pasta recipe becomes more delicious if you use pasta water in the sauce. Homemade pasta releases better liquid to add to sauces because its flavors, still fresh, filter better into the water used to cook it.
– Pasta made directly in your own kitchen does not have preservatives added to its ingredients. Due to this, it will definitely be more nutritious and better tasting.
– Making your own pasta also gives you the possibility to choose your own ingredients according to your preferences. You can make it with Italian durum semolina or a mixture of semolina and flour. If you have a wheat intolerance, you can also use buckwheat as a suitable alternative. The nutty flavor of pasta made with this ingredient will definitely add a unique touch to your pasta dish.
So if you are deliberating between using fresh and dry pasta, then you should go with the former. Although it takes a long and slow process to make pasta yourself, this is outweighed by the many benefits you can get from it. I even took cooking lessons to know how to make my own pasta because I know they will give me more pros than cons compared to the store bought ones I used before.
