The advantages of using fresh pasta

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 everything Italian, especially Italian food and, as expected, our favorite is pasta. However, I’ve found that the best chefs don’t use dried or store-bought pasta. So, I embarked 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 notice 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 lighter 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 for your recipe. This is because the one you make at home can absorb the flavors of the sauce better than the dry ones, which are much heavier. The lightness of your pasta will allow it to absorb the essence of ingredients such as seafood, meats, cheeses, olive oil and tomatoes, among others.

– Any pasta recipe becomes more delicious if you use pasta water in the sauce. Homemade pasta gives off better liquid to add to sauces because its flavors, even fresh, are better filtered into the water used to cook it.

– Pasta made directly in your own kitchen does not have preservatives added to its ingredients. Because of 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 grits or a mix of grits and flour. If you have an intolerance to wheat, you can also use buckwheat as a suitable alternative. The nutty flavor of pasta made with this ingredient will definitely add a unique twist to your pasta dish.

So if you are deliberating between using fresh and dried pasta, then you should go for 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 learn 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.