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Step 1
Find fresh pastas in a range of flavors in your grocery store's refrigerator section or at a local farmers' market or specialty store. You can also buy them online at sites like FreshPasta.com.
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Step 2
Enjoy high-quality artisanal pastas. Sold at specialty stores or gourmet markets, these pastas are dried over several days.
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Step 3
Choose from a variety of surface textures as well as shapes. Sauces stick more to ridged pastas.
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Step 4
Stash several boxes of dried pasta in the cupboard for super fast meals. It's typically made with durum wheat or semolina flour, giving it a firmer texture, but may have less flavor due to its fast, high-temperature drying process (140 to 160 degrees F; 60 to 71 C).
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Step 5
Try your hand at cranking out homemade pasta. All-purpose flour gives it a tender texture and lets it cook quickly. Knead the dough with beets, lemons, saffron and spinach to infuse flavor.
Comments
tomain said
on 2/15/2009 The Barilla brand of pasta is excellent. It is no longer produced in Italy, but it appears to me to taste as good as it ever has. It has a firm texture, and you have more margin of error when cooking than other dried pasta brands. if you accidentally overcook the past, it will still be fairly good.
Anonymous said
on 11/22/2005 Keep in mind that fresh pasta cooks twice as fast a dried pasta and the smaller the pasta the faster it cooks.
There is a reason why pastas are shaped they way they are. Most of them are designed to trap sauce and hold on to it, unlike spaghetti which is the best overall pasta. Use different pastas when you make spaghetti, it is a welcome change.