General Tips
Measurements
I’m not going to lie to you: the only time I measure food is when I develop recipes for a cookbook or when I bake bread or sweets. Blame it on the Italians who taught me to cook using pinches and handfuls. I believe in cooking by instinct. If you were also taught by an army of wonderful cooks, feel free to cook intuitively rather than following the recipes to the letter. If you’re still building your skills, follow the quantities in the recipes to ensure your success in faithfully re-creating island flavors. I’ve used US measurements throughout, but for the bread and pasta recipes, I include metric units. Measuring by weight is simply more accurate than by volume, and using cups and tablespoons for recipes that need precision can be a recipe for disaster—or at least inconsistency. A decent digital kitchen scale that measures in grams costs less than $15, so please, for the love of dio, use one when metric units are listed.
Seasoning
When salting water for boiling pasta or for blanching vegetables, aim for the salinity of a seasoned soup. Go a little saltier for fresh pastas than dried pastas, since fresh pastas spend much less time in the water and need the extra seasoning. Season savory dishes with salt to taste. That is, until they taste delicious to you. If you have the time and refrigerator space, salt fish a few hours ahead of cooking and meat overnight. When you’re instructed to salt a dish while cooking, use your instincts. Salting throughout the cooking process is crucial for building flavor. Taste the dish and adjust the seasoning as needed before serving.
Prep
Read the entire recipe—including the headnote— before you start cooking. If there’s a lot of advanced prep involved, I’ll mention it in the headnote. Prepare all your ingredients before starting to cook: weigh, chop, and portion in advance so everything is ready to go when you need it. I started doing this very recently, when I began making lots of pizza for another book (shout-out to The Joy of Pizza!). It makes the whole cooking process smoother and less chaotic. Trust me. Try it. As a bonus you can smugly refer to this set up by its French name, mise en place.
Pasta Serving Sizes and Cook Times
If you plan to eat the pasta alongside a protein, the dish will feed six; if pasta is the main course, it will feed closer to four.
Al dente means cooked rice or pasta still has bite to it (dente means “tooth”). Islanders detest pasta scotta (overcooked pasta), except for Venetians, who love it, and many love pasta cooked al chiodo (less cooked than al dente). You might be surprised how raw the pasta served on the other Italian islands seems compared to what you might encounter in North America—or even Northern Italy. I assure you, the islanders are not doing it wrong. In fact, there’s a whole science behind why pasta should be cooked to the “rare” side rather than to the point of being soft. Fresh pastas should be cooked until they have lost their raw flavor, but cannot be cooked until al dente because they were never hard in the first place.
Making Dough
I like mixing dough with my hands, and recommend that you do so, too. I may initially bring flour and water together with a spoon, but then I get my hands in the mix so I can feel the dough as it changes texture and builds strength. Hand-mixing just puts you in closer contact with the dough and at the risk of sounding ridiculous, it really returns you to the primitive beauty of cooking, back to a time thousands of years ago when the first doughs were mixed. For pros, it’s an essential connection with the final product, and for novices it lets you feel how the flour and water are reacting with one another and, in the case of breads, how the dough is developing strength or how it is fermenting. Baking recipes will indicate that you need to preheat a steel or stone along with your oven at least 45 minutes before you plan to bake. This will get the steel (or stone) very hot, which is essential for even cooking.
