When most people think of Italian cooking and food their minds go to pizza, spaghetti, garlic bread, or chicken alfredo all served in a tiny restaurant with a red and white checked table cloth lit only by candle light. This is what the majority of people in the western world consider authentic Italian cooking, however, they would be wrong. This is simply a western adaptation of traditional food found only in Italy.
When attempting to make Italian food at home many people refer to these adaptations instead of finding authentic dishes to make at home. Because, of these western interpretations many people end up ruining their dishes by making some of the most common mistakes when cooking Italian food from home. Here are the five basic mistakes made by many home cooks when making Italian cuisine.
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The most common mistakes made come when people attempt to cook pasta at home. Using store bought pasta is perfectly fine, if not encouraged when you are unable to make your own at home. The mistake occurs when most go to cook the pasta.
Make sure your water is boiling, not simmering but fully boiling. Boiling water can be identified by when large bubbles rise to the surface continually and rapidly and the water reaches 100 degrees Celsius.
Do not under any circumstance add oil of any kind to the water while you are cooking your pasta. It is believed to help prevent the pasta from sticking to itself while cooking, when in actuality it does nothing other than ruin your pasta. As long as your water is boiling and you stir occasionally, your pasta will not stick to itself. The only thing you need to add to the water after that is a bit of salt for seasoning.
After the pasta is done cooking and you drain the water do not rinse your pasta. First you should set aside about a cup of pasta water to add to your sauce if it is too thick, before you drain the pasta. After you drain the pasta, you should never rinse the pasta under cold or hot water, as it will remove any remaining starch from the noodles. If you remove the starch from the pasta the sauce will not stick to it, essentially giving you very plain pasta and a bowl of sauce to eat separately.
When it comes to pizza toppings everyone has their favourites whether that be peperoni, pineapple, mushrooms, bacon, or just plain cheese everyone has their own preferences. However, the issue is when restaurants or recipes claim to be authentic Italian pizza when they are in fact not as they feature a variety of ingredients not found in Italian cuisine.
Despite the avid debate over pineapple on pizza it simply does not matter, as pineapple is not a topping in Italy. Along with pineapple many common toppings here in North America are not found anywhere in Italian food.
Many meats including chicken, steak, ground beef, breakfast sausage, and even bacon are not common, meats on Italian pizzas are typically anchovies, pancetta (this is different from bacon), prosciutto, or another thinly sliced ham. Vegetables like corn, jalapenos, banana peppers, broccoli, or sweet bell peppers to name a few are not traditional, in Italy you will find tomatoes, garlic, mushrooms, or basil.
Along with our weird topping choices we often over crowd our pizzas, many featuring too many toppings to count. Most Italian pizzas keep it rather simple or plain featuring only two or three toppings at a time, as the point of the dish is to celebrate the ingredients and truly taste them individually.
Often when choosing to make Italian food most people only make one dish and serve it with a side of salad or garlic bread and then call it a day. They often forget that Italy like many other countries like to serve balanced meals, featuring a meat, a starch, and a vegetable most commonly.
Within many Italian dishes you can find at least two of these three elements to make a balanced meal, for example lasagna has ground beef between the layers which covers the meat and the pasta covers the starch but you would still need to serve it either with seasonal vegetables or with a salad in order to fully balance it. However, not all dishes will feature two elements and you will then need to make at least one other dish to make up for it. An example would be to serve a caprese salad which most commonly is mozzarella, tomato, and basil, but you can add prosciutto to have a meat. Then you would serve a dish like spaghetti bolognaise to cover your starch.
A common mistake at home but mainly in restaurants is the order in which the dishes are served. Many restaurants and home cooks serve their food as you would in North America, appetizer first, then a starter soup or salad, then the entire, and finally a dessert maybe served with coffee.
Similar to North America, in Italy the appetizer is served first typically featuring some light meats and cheeses perhaps served with a balsamic. Then the next course is separated into two categories, the primo (pastas and risottos) and the secondo (a fish, meat, or vegetarian dish). These are the main dishes of the meal; you do not need to have both as they are normally fairly hefty dishes but unlike North America, these are in separate sections of a menu. After your main you then are severed contorni (side dishes, vegetables or salad), the salad and vegetables are either served alongside the main course as a side dish and eaten after or simply served after as in Italy you do not want to fill up on leaves when you have pasta to eat. After that you typically eat either fruit or dessert and then finally coffee.
Many of the dishes we see here in the western world that claim to be authentic Italian dishes have actually never been seen in Italy. A lot of American interpretations of Italian cooking have somehow over the years been passed off to us westerners as real Italian food when it could not be further from it.
A favourite among many, especially children fettuccini alfredo is not actually a dish in Italy. Alfredo pasta is not typically found in Italy, perhaps in some more touristy locations as a way of pleasing foreigners but outside of that it is not found in most of the country. It also most certainly cannot be found with chicken in it. Despite the fact that it may be your favourite you will have a really tough time finding it if you ever leave North America.
Everyone knows what garlic bread is and everyone for the most part loves it; served alongside their favourite pasta as a way of getting all of the leftover sauce out of the bowl at the end of the meal. However, garlic bread is not actually a thing in Italy, baguettes for one are French which is what most garlic bread is served as. Most dishes in Italy will be served with a side of bread but it is normally a plain roll or bread stick used to eat the leftover sauce as not to waste food. It normally does not have garlic as it is meant to be a plain base for the sauce. You may instead find garlic bruschetta or bread served for dipping in a garlic-based sauce, but never garlic bread.
Now yes, carbonara is a real Italian dish you can find it in Italy and it is quite traditional. However, the western adaptation of carbonara is not traditional in any sense and will never be found in an Italian kitchen. Most western versions of the dish use cream in order to get its traditional creamy texture and taste, while in the real version you simply use egg yolk and some parmigiana reggiano. Many western versions add in extra ingredients such as mushrooms, garlic, pine nuts, or onions none of which are actually in carbonara. You may also often find bacon used instead of pancetta or referred to within the recipe as one in the same, however, pancetta and bacon are different and should not be used interchangeably.
Now it is not to say that you will not find ketchup in Italy but, rather that you will not find ketchup in, on, or around pasta. Some western versions of pastas or pasta sauces feature ketchup as an ingredient. It can be seen as either the soul topping for a pasta or as an addition to a pasta sauce to add more of a sweet tomato flavour rather than a rich one. The common mix up actually comes from the Philippine version of spaghetti, where ketchup is a featured ingredient as the dish is meant to be sweeter rather than savory. Ketchup has never once been used on any Italian dish and probably never will be.
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