You follow recipes (or don’t) and the results are ‘meh.’ How do get better cooking pasta? Here are tips that will drastically improve your pasta dishes. These tips and more can be found in our best pasta cookbook for beginners: Pasta Affair!
Choose Quality Pasta
If you want to get better at cooking pasta, you need to start with good quality pasta. Not all pasta is created equal. The best pasta is made from durum wheat semolina flour and is cut with a bronze die (called trafilata al bronzo or simply bronze die-cut). Why does the type of machine used to cut the pasta matter? A bronze die creates a more porous pasta which gives the pasta a better texture and helps it to cling to sauce better.
Discover our picks for the best pasta brands in Italy in our article!
Don’t Overcook Your Pasta
Soft, soggy pasta is gross. In Italy, pasta is cooked to al dente—which literally means ‘to the teeth’ and refers to the pasta having a bit of chewiness to the texture. Always follow the recommending cooking time for al dente pasta on the package instructions.
Salt the Pasta Cooking Water
The water in which a pasta is cooking must be salted—otherwise the pasta will be bland tasting. Use coarse sea salt or kosher salt. Avoid iodized salt because this can impart a weird, metallic taste to the pasta. Salt after the water is boiling—before adding the pasta. If you add the salt before the water is boiling, the water will take longer to boil. The pasta should be exposed to the salt for most or all of its cook time to properly flavor it.
You can use fine salt as well, but coarse salt is easier to measure. For a large pot of water, a few handfuls of coarse salt is typically enough. For exact recommendations on how much salt to add, check our cookbook:
While tripe isn’t for everyone, this is the definitive Italian Tripe recipe for anyone who likes beef tripe. The sauce—with tomato, mint, white wine and pecorino cheese—is divine.
This recipe uses beef tripe parts from all three edible stomachs of the cow. Preparing tripe is not complicated—the complicated part may be finding it at a local butcher!
Tripe is extremely nutritious! It is low in fat and high in protein. In ancient times, it was a main source of nutrition for poor Italians who couldn’t afford choicer cuts of meat.
Watch the Video Recipe!
Learn how to make Italian Tripe recipe with our video recipe, filmed in Italy:
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How to Make Italian Tripe
For the complete recipe for making Roman Tripe, check out the recipe card below!
What is Tripe?
Tripe is the edible stomachs of the cow. There are three, each with a different texture.
Boil it for 15 minutes.
Even if the tripe you’ve purchased is already clean, we recommend boiling it in salt water with onion, carrot and celery for 15 minutes to remove any lingering odor.
Serve with bread!
Italian Tripe is traditionally served with bread for a fantastic scarpetta (sopping up the sauce).
Best Pasta Cookbook? Ours!
Seductive strands of pasta and sumptuous sauces… Are you ready to indulge in an unforgettable Pasta Affair? This cookbook is a must-have for any serious lover of Italian food, featuring over 50 classic pasta recipes you can make at home!
AVAILABLE AS A PRINT HARDCOVER OR EBOOK
Tomato Products We Recommend
This tripe recipe calls for crushed tomatoes. In Italy, Italians have a secret for crushed tomatoes: they use or buy whole peeled tomatoes, remove the seeds and ‘water’ and then crush them with a blender or by hand. Why not just buy crushed tomatoes?
Italians know that canned crushed tomatoes tend to be less sweet than passata (purée) or whole peeled canned tomatoes. This is because skins and seeds often make their way into crushed tomato products, which produces a less sweet product.
For dishes like Roman Style Tripe (Trippa alla Romana), here in the PIATTO™ kitchen we tend to use:
To find out more about why, check out our guide on best canned tomatoes for sauce!
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Other Italian Tripe Recipes
Check out the traditional recipe for Trippa alla Fiorentina (Florence Style Tripe) on our website!
Discover More Roman Food Recipes!
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Italian Tripe Recipe – Trippa alla Romana
Ingredients
- 2.2 lb beef tripe cleaned
- 1 onion for pre-cooking the tripe
- 1 carrot for pre-cooking the tripe
- 1 rib celery for pre-cooking the tripe
- 1 onion chopped
- ½ carrot chopped
- 1 rib celery chopped
- 28 oz crushed tomatoes
- handful fresh mint minced
- 4 tbsp pecorino romano cheese finely grated
- ½ cup dry white wine
- 4 tbsp olive oil or as needed
- fresh chili peppers to taste
- fine salt to taste
- black pepper to taste
Instructions
Pre-Cook the Tripe
- Boil the tripe for 15 minutes in salted water with a whole onion, carrot and celery to remove the last of the odor. Drain and set aside.
Sauté the Tripe
- Coat the bottom of a skillet generously with olive oil. Sauté the chopped onion, carrot and celery over medium-low heat until the onions start to appear translucent.
- Add the tripe to the vegetables and salt and pepper to taste. Cook for a few minutes over medium heat.
- Add a ½ cup of white wine. Stir, and cook until the wine has evaporated.
Make the Sauce
- Add crushed tomato and a 1 1/2 cups of water to the tripe.
- Bring the sauce to a boil. Add a handful of fresh mint and a pinch of salt.
- Cover and cook the tripe in the sauce over medium-low heat for 2 hours.
Finish with Pecorino Cheese
- After the two hours, turn off the heat and add about 4 Tbs of freshly grated Pecorino Romano cheese. Stir to melt the cheese. Feel free to top with more pecorino when you serve the dish.
Avoid ‘One Pot’ Pasta Dishes
We know—’one pot’ pasta dishes are all the rage. Since most pasta recipes are quick and easy to begin with, the main advantage to the ‘one pot’ recipes is having one less dish to clean. That’s fine, however you need to be quite careful about the order in which you cook ingredients in that pot to avoid the risk of overcooking your pasta into a soggy mess (see “Don’t Overcook Your Pasta”).
Cooking pasta in the sauce (or at least finishing it in the sauce) is actually a real technique that can help you get better at cooking pasta. However, it’s important that the sauce ingredients are cooked enough before you add the pasta. Otherwise you’ll be continuing to cook (or rather overcook) the pasta simply to finish cooking the sauce ingredients. Also, your sauce needs to be liquidy enough to properly cook the pasta.
Personally, we think if your goal is to get better at cooking pasta, you should cook the pasta in a separate pot and finish it in the sauce at the end.
Follow Recipes Until You Understand What Works
There’s an old saying “You must learn the rules before you can break them.” This applies to cooking pasta and cooking in general. If your goal is to get better at cooking pasta dishes using Italian recipes, actually follow authentic Italian pasta recipes such as those on this website!
As Italian pasta recipes have been popularized around the world, many of the ingredients and techniques that made those recipes so delicious have gotten lost. As Italian immigrants have searched for ways to replace hard-to-find ingredients with ingredients available in their new home country, flavor has often been compromised.
If a traditional Italian pasta recipe says to use “Parmigiano Reggiano cheese” or “pecorino cheese,” don’t make a cheese substitution until you’ve actually tried following the original recipe using the recommended ingredients. So-called ‘parmesan’ is NOT the same cheese as ‘Parmigiano Reggiano” in most countries—including the United States. If you use it in place of Parmigiano, you’ll never understand what the dish is supposed to taste like.
Choose Quality Pasta Sauce Ingredients
There are a few ingredients that pop up again and again in Italian pasta recipes. To get better at cooking pasta, you need to learn how to select great tasting ingredients. For instance:
Italian Cheeses
Get to know your Italian cheeses. A little Parmigiano Reggiano goes a long way and it is a completely different product than ‘parmesan’—look for the real thing. Pecorino Romano is a delicious cheese featured in many Italian recipes. Similarly, gorgonzola is another very tasty cheese that will improve your pasta game.
Quality, Sweet Tomato Products
Look for canned and jarred products that say they are made from ‘San Marzano’ tomatoes. These tomatoes are grown in perfect conditions in Italy and are world-renowned for their sweet, robust flavor. Instead of looking for ‘tricks’ like baking soda, carrots, sugar to ‘sweeten’ your tomato sauce, find the best tomato sauce.
Beware: There has been some controversy abroad due to some companies (Cento, we are looking at you) trying to mislead consumers. In Italy, there are many products and ingredients which are labelled DOP. This is a label that is respected in Italy and demonstrates the product has undergone rigorous standards to be considered “produced, processed and developed in a specific geographical area, using the recognized know-how of local producers and ingredients from the region concerned.”
Cento and some other companies have been known to vaguely put a phrase like ‘certified San Marzano’ on their packaging. ‘Certified’ in this sense means nothing, as everyone in Italy understands it is the DOP label that matters. Unfortunately, consumers abroad are not aware of this, and believe they are getting the highest quality Italian products based on this misleading label.
Here’s a look at tomato brands we prefer and why. Note that these are brands we also buy in Italy.
Choose quality, sweet tomato products.