This Tuscan bread and tomato soup—known throughout Italy as pappa al pomodoro—is a poor man’s dish that doesn’t require any in-season ingredients and can be enjoyed at any time of the year.
Pizza Marinara, also known as pizza alla marinara, is a traditional Neapolitan-style pizza.
In its simplest form, this pizza is prepared with chunky San Marzano tomato sauce, Mediterranean sea salt flakes, extra virgin olive oil, and freshly-cracked black pepper.
When you’re craving homemade pizza but don’t want to make dough from scratch, you can save yourself the mess of mixing and kneading by buying frozen pizza dough from the store.
Should you let it rise before baking?
The labels on most frozen doughs are surprisingly vague about this. I guess most brands haven’t thought about what happens after you’ve taken their products off the freezer shelves.
Do you need to cook pasta on high heat?
It’s a question a friend of mine, who recently got into cooking, asked. And, truth be told, I hadn’t given it that much thought.
Since she’s probably not the only one asking, I thought to do my usual research into the science of cooking pasta—and write this post.
So, for all of you out there who may be wondering whether or not to set the heat on your stove to high when cooking pasta, here’s everything you need to know (and nothing you don’t).
One of the things I love about home cooking is that, in your own kitchen, you get to set the rules. As long as you know what you’re doing, you can take the occasional shortcut here and there—and your meals will still come out tasting great.
When it comes to pizza, that occasional shortcut for me is store-bought pizza dough. Yes, I mean the same kind you typically bring back home from the grocery store’s frozen dough section.
Talking to my friends and exchanging emails or comments with my readers on the topic, I’ve seen that one question frequently comes up.
As you read pizza recipes on the Internet and in cookbooks, you’ll notice that some of them call for a cooked tomato sauce with a long simmer time, while others tell you to use tomatoes right out of the can.
Should you cook pizza sauce or not?
One of the many reasons for my long-standing obsession with Italian cuisine is its ability to take a few simple ingredients and turn them into some of the most appetizing and aromatic food you’ve ever had.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the recipes from Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, known for its fertile lands, medieval towns, culinary tradition, and dramatic seaside. Today, I’m going to give you a taste of it with my Pasta in Brodo recipe.
Cheese, grated finely on top, mixed into the sauce, or used as a filling, can take your home-cooked pasta to chef-level. Knowing which cheese to buy at the grocery store and how to cook it with your pasta can make or break a good recipe.
In this post, I’ll tell you all about the six best (and most traditional) cheeses for adding to your pasta dishes. I’ll also give you my best techniques for adding cheese to pasta, so that you can excel at every recipe.
My wife and I joined a group of friends at their beach house for the weekend. As usual, I volunteered to cook the food, which, just as usual, everyone else was secretly hoping for (all you have to do is ask, guys).
I wanted to make my signature penne tomato pasta. So I went to the grocery store and stocked up on penne rigate, a couple of cans of whole peeled tomatoes, a piece of parmesan cheese, a bulb or two of garlic, and some sea salt.
Cooking for a crowd is always a challenge—especially if you’re used to measuring ingredients for a couple of persons. To add to it, there wasn’t a kitchen scale at the summer house and penne pasta tends to get bigger when cooked.
How much of it was I supposed to cook?
