This cartoon brought me up short.
(WuMo)
My practice has been to take spaghetti out of the box and break the strands into four smaller pieces before cooking it. That way I don’t have to go through what (to me) is the tedious business of winding long strands of spaghetti on the fork when eating. But maybe for some, that is the appeal of spaghetti.
I refer to long strands of cooked pasta as “slithery stuff”. Penne, rotini, egg noodles, and shells (in soup) are my household staples. Occasionally I do cook soba to have with a stir-fry, but break the strands into manageable pieces before cooking.
I, too, break my spaghetti into four pieces, which I initially started doing for my (then) small children to reduce the hazard of gagging/choking. It’s so much easier to eat that way and I find you get less marinara sauce on your clothes when you don’t have to twirl it onto your fork. I find it difficult to believe that it would alter the taste in any way.
I did winding for decades, but recently started cutting the spaghetti after cooking and adding sauce.
A few years ago we had a visiting student from Italy. He explained at length how each shape of pasta is designed to be prepared with one specific sauce, and that randomly mixing and matching them as we (all non-Italians) do is a crime against food.
You monster!
I guess my question is: why are you using spaghetti, if you don’t want spaghetti?
anat has a point, though of course it’s not a crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pasta
This is seen as criminal:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/03/23/tiktok-pasta-blender-reaction/
My family on both sides is pure Italian for centuries. So, Mano, I’m sorry to say, you *never* break spaghetti strands. You don’t wind it on the fork in the bowl of a spoon either. These are heresies.
I think that you have to learn how to twirl spaghetti around your fork from birth. That was the only way we were allowed to eat (always unbroken) spaghetti from childhood, and now my whole family is expert at it and it’s really easy to do. (Or maybe it’s evo psych: Italians have evolved genes for that behavior.)
Rob @3 and Anat @4, it is correct that every shape of pasta is made to take up the sauce in a different way, and it does taste different on different shapes. That’s why there are so many kinds of pasta shapes.
I don’t know why spaghetti became the only main shape in America, and marinara sauce became almost the only sauce. But, people here don’t get a lot of chances to try the other shapes and sauces, so the differences between their flavors isn’t apparent.
Also, pasta is not dinner. A small portion of it comes after the antipasto, then come the main course.
Rigatoni and fusilli are a lot easier to eat.
I also break spaghetti into quarters from the original length before boiling. That is how I like it. It is not wrong to do so. I eat my food the way I like it. You can eat your food the way you like it.
When I was a young teenager, when my mom had baked potatoes with dinner, I would slice, dice, and chop my potato, skin and all, then add butter, etc. to it. For some reason this angered my father who thought the “proper” way to eat a baked potato was to leave the outer shell intact and add the butter, etc. to the top and mix it in. I told him that he could eat his potato the way he wanted, but I was going to eat mine the way that I wanted.
If someone thinks that there is only one way to eat something, they are sadly mistaken. Eat the foods you like the way that you like to eat them. If you show me a different way to eat something, and I like that way better, I may change. Otherwise, leave me alone.
I usually break spaghetti in half, but not quarters; the only reason I do that is because I don’t really have lots of pots that are big enough to take full strands of spaghetti without them leaning out the pot at the top and having to be slid in later once the half the was already in the boiling water is soft enough to bend.
That said, that sort of thing is one of the reasons I often go for rotini these days instead, I don’t have to worry about that.
A local restaurant used to do one of the best spaghetti dishes I’ve ever had: the sauce was just butter, olive oil that had chili peppers soaking in it, and finely chopped roasted garlic. No tomato or other thick sauce. Nice and subtle with a bit of a kick.
I’ve also got a friend who’s Sicilian but his wife is Neapolitan. If you think arguments about American treatment of Italian food are bad, you should listen to some of the intra-Italian arguments.
Dunc @#5,
I like the thinnest possible form of pasta. If available, I use angel hair pasta, which I think of as thinner spaghetti.
My wife likes her pasta short, I like it long, and we both like it thin. So I generally cook angel-hair pasta, and break it in half once to satisfy both of us. This isn’t to say we don’t eat other pasta, egg noodles in a sour-cream mushroom sauce are excellent with pork chops.
In our opinion, the best meat for a marinara is kielbasa. It holds it’s shape, has a great flavor, and helps to cut through the tomato flavor. I know it sounds a little weird, but boy is it good. Italian sausages are too spicy for this to work well, but Polish sausages are just right. We are clearly not cuisine purists.
I’ve done thin sauces, like jenorafeuer described @9. Recently I’ve been experimenting with a lemon shrimp sauce, and it’s quite good. Melt 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons olive oil in a pan over medium heat. Throw in some minced garlic to sauté for about 2 minutes, add a single vegetable (we like broccoli for this), cook until the vegetable is done, throw in a teaspoon of chili flakes, a quarter-teaspoon of salt, a cup (or two) of small pre-cooked salad shrimp (thawed), toss for another couple minutes so everything is coated. Take it off the heat, then add 2 teaspoons of lemon juice and mix. Either mix the cooked pasta into the pan, or serve on top of the cooked pasta. My wife always wants me to make extra for her lunch the next couple of days. The secret to making it taste bright is the lemon juice, but that has to be added last because cooking heat will ruin it’s flavor.
I read your post and I was shocked that you broke up your spaghetti before you cooked it. Shocked I say!
Then I thought, how pretentious of me, it’s only food; cook and eat it any way you want!
Then because others had mentioned it, I felt the urge to share how much I disliked angel hair pasta!
But finally I thought, why should it matter to me whether strangers know what my personal preferences are? In fact, why am I posting this comment anyway?!
🙂
flex @#11,
Thanks for the recipe. It looks tasty and (important for me) easy to make!
I’m going to try it.
I also break spaghetti in half, due to small pan issues. I’m not sure why anyone would break it in quarters, it doesn’t feel much like spaghetti at that point.
@7 garnetstar: Spaghetti with bland marina turned into a main dish in the US when early poor Italian immigrants went with the cheapest pasta and made cheap sauce and called it a meal. It spread in the US, where people long had an affection for large bland meals.
Breaking spaghetti into quarters seems like a lot of extra trouble. I just break them into halves: two hands, two halves, break once, toss everything into the water at once.
And no, garnetstar, marinara is not the only sauce, even in big generic US grocery stores. And I, for one, add all manner of stuff to my store-bought sauces, from tomato paste to random spices to zucchini and bell peppers and soy-based fake ground beef. If all the store-bought sauces are bland, it’s so we can whatever tasty stuff we want to it.
I’ve also got a friend who’s Sicilian but his wife is Neapolitan…you should listen to some of the intra-Italian arguments.
Yeah, this is one reason Italians couldn’t do fascism “right,” even though they’d invented it.
Baffling. If you are cooking with the intent to have short pasta, buy a short pasta. You’re just making work for yourself otherwise.
Another person who cooks for herself, thus can’t justify a huge pan, thus breaks long, slender noodles in 1/2.
@Holms: Shorter capellini and shorter spaghetti are generally not available, and when they are, you pay extra. If you like capellini broken in half, why spend more money to avoid the work of less than a second?
“Making work for myself”? Pfft. I’m making work for myself if I spend more money than necessary, thus requiring me to literally work more in order to buy the things that I would otherwise miss because I spent an unnecessary amount on pasta. The work of breaking a handful of long noodles in 2 is nothing to that.
Interestingly, according to the social historian Alberto Grandi, most of these supposedly sacred Italian food traditions are (a) surprisingly recent, and (b) completely made up: Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong. (It’s in the FT, so possibly paywalled… Sorry.)
…come to think of it, I could *possibly* try boiling the noodles in my bigger frying pan, but that’s got significant safety issues, plus I suspect that this would somehow be committing an even bigger cuisine heresy. 😅
As an Italian, I am appalled by such behaviour!
But seriously, now I am curious: are other pasta types not available where you live? Maybe shorter shapes would be easier to handle and will avoid the Medusa tangle you can get with spaghetti (and by the way, there’s a Chinese noodle variety which is literally one meter long, imagine that: “customers strangle themselves while eating”).
@19: Mr Grandi makes some good points, but what little I read from him suggests he’s too much of a shock jock. One comment of his, that the rich Americans, having tomato sauce readily available, were able to invent/reinvent pizza while them poor Italians had none is absolute crap. He seriously underestimates the ingenuity of even the poorest households in coming up with really good stuff using the poorest ingredients imaginable. It’s called “cucina povera”, and it’s the source of basically everything that’s eaten today, and it goes a long way back. Also, there was indeed poverty but in times without wars the land was and is able to provide a lot. Even Goethe commented on it, dangit! (Italienische Reise, notes on 17 March 1787).
I’ve always broken spaghetti noodles in half so they fit in the pot of boiling water, and cook evenly. If you want to cook it authentically, that pasta then goes into the sauce for a few minutes of additional cooking and infusing.
Since it tastes exactly the same no matter the length of the pasta, it’s silly to claim there is a wrong way to cook it.
I enjoy pho too, with part of that enjoyment arising from the fact that eating it ‘properly’ involves breaking multiple rules of table manners. Slurping the noodles is proper etiquette. Biting off the portion that didn’t slurp and letting it fall back into the bowl is considered perfectly normal rather than an offense that would get me sent to my room with no dinner.
The Italians on my block (from different parts of Italy and diaspora of same and boy did they argue) told us that American pizza wasn’t really Italian and they themselves made these focaccia-type things if they made them at all.
They laughed at, when they went to Italy to visit relatives, how other Americans who were tourists and not-family would expect there to be pizza in Italy. And there just wasn’t.
The way I learned to do it in Italy is you use just the fork, twist some spaghetti onto it, then lift it to your mouth and snip the all the “overhanging” strands with your teeth. Chew, swallow, repeat. This is the fastest way to eat spaghetti and what to me feels the most ergonomic, since you’re only shortening the strands the the least necessary, the spag is untangling as you go and as you reach the end of the plate you’ll have a nice mix of short and semi-long strands that are easy to pick up.
This method also allows you to just randomly twist up a single full strand if you want.
JM, @15, thanks, I didn’t know that. And, Raging Bee @16, yes, almost all the bottled and canned commercially available sauces are tomato-based, i.e. “tomato sauce”. In Italy, a tomato-based sauce (I don’t mean a sauce that just has tomatoes in it, tomato-based) like those is marinara sauce, and even adding vegetables, soy, more tomato paste, etc., it’s still marinara sauce. Although, if you add ground beef, it becomes Bolognese sauce.
seachange@23, that’s so funny. My grandmother, born in Umbria in 1904, made what she called pizza a lot. It was
two pieces of flatbread with cooked Swiss chard in between, the top bread brushed lightly with olive oil, black pepper, and rosemary and baked. Delicious, but our friends were extremely puzzled by what they got when my grandmother offered pizza.
My Mom and Dad went on their first date to the first pizza place that opened in Pittsburgh. A novelty for both (and for everyone then, pizza was just starting up), they’d never seen what the restaurant was selling.
How long is the regular length of spaghetti sold in the USA? I ask because Crip Dyke talks of shorter lengths being more expensive. In the UK the regular length sold is about 30 cm or a foot long, you pay more if you want the metre length version, and it comes wrapped in blue paper, just like it did when it was the only length you could buy when I was a child. Also without knowing how long your initial spaghetti is I’ve no idea what size pieces you are all ending up with.
Personally I’ve a nostalgic fondness for the really long spaghetti, but rarely buy it as it is so much more expensive. I twirl on the plate. I would only use spaghetti for fairly thin sauces, if there are chunky pieces I’d use shells or orrichiette.