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, unsurprisingly, our favorite is pasta. However, I found that the best chefs don’t use dry or store-bought pasta. So, I set out 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 could see the benefits of using it fresh instead of dried.
These are just some of the benefits I discovered when 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 preparing 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 is able to absorb the flavors of the sauce better than the dry ones that are much heavier. The lightness of its pasta will allow it to absorb the essence of ingredients such as seafood, meats, cheeses, olive oil and tomatoes, among others.
– Any pasta recipe is made more delicious if you use pasta water in the sauce. Homemade pasta gives off better liquid to add to sauces because its flavors, which are still fresh, can better filter into the water used to cook it.
– Pasta made directly in your own kitchen does not have any 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 wheat 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 for the former. Although it takes a long and slow process to make the pasta yourself, this is overestimated by the many benefits you can get from it. I even took cooking lessons to find out how to make my own pasta because I know they will give me more advantages than disadvantages compared to the store bought ones I used before.
