Did you know that Italian cuisine is the third favorite food for American millennials? Whether it’s dining at restaurants or cooking at home, you can bet there are plates of pasta being wolfed down.
Despite their popularity though, popular Italian dishes are often made wrong or butchered when people cook. We commend them for their efforts, but when making Italian food, you’ve got to make sure you honor the cuisine and culture.
To make sure you don’t make grave errors in your kitchen, here are some common mistakes and how you can avoid them.
Adding Seasoning While Cooking Pasta
Some people want to get fancy and throw in a bunch of spices while boiling their pasta, but that’s a huge no-no. All you need is water and some salt, period!
The sauce is what makes the pasta stand out, so save your seasoning for that. The most popular Italian restaurants use things like oregano, thyme, and rosemary.
Adding Oil While Cooking Pasta
Another big error people make while cooking pasta is adding oil. There’s a common misconception that this helps pasta from sticking, but it’ll just make it gross.
What you should do is add oil after you’ve drained the pasta!
Using Any Cheese for Your Italian Dishes
You’re looking at a recipe and it says you need Parmesan or pecorino cheese, but you don’t have any. So you think that you can just substitute it with whatever you’ve got in the fridge, right? Wrong!
Different types of cheese have various hardness levels and flavors, so putting cheddar into your Italian dishes would be a huge mistake. So before you cook Italian food, make sure you’ve bought the right cheese first!
Using Cream in Carbonara Pasta
If you’ve looked up carbonara pasta recipes, you might find that a lot of home chefs use cream. This might make it seem like it’s acceptable in Italian cuisine to do so, but it’s also another affront to this type of food.
The fact is, traditional carbonara doesn’t use cream, but instead, egg yolks. On that note, it also uses pecorino cheese, so make sure you’ve got both to make carbonara correctly.
Having Bread With Pasta
You’ll find that many restaurants serve regular or garlic bread with pasta. But in reality, you shouldn’t have Italian side dishes with your pasta. It’s already a heavy enough meal that can stand alone.
If you really want to have some bread, serve it as an appetizer, as that’s how it’s done in Italy. But truthfully, they only have appetizers and desserts on special occasions. So if you want to be authentic, make your pasta the sole star of the show.
Have Fun Making Italian Food
Making Italian food should be a fun experience, especially since you get to taste what you’ve made. Now that you know what the most common mistakes are, you’ll be able to create an authentic Italian meal menu that’ll wow all your friends and family!
If you’re interested in Italian food pairings, then keep browsing our blog page now.