Have you had handmade gnocchi and pasta in Italy, or is making them a lot art, even in Italy?
I just learned how to make gnocchi and pasta. They are not nearly as difficult to make as I thought they would be.
This brings to mind, that on any of my around 7 trips to Italy, I have never had handmade gnocchi or pasta there. Has anyone? If so, in where and was it expensive?
Reply to this Such a wholesome post! Lets hope we can keep it from degenerating into one of those Best_______E-VERR! posts flooding the forums of late;-)
I had to think about this one. Similarly I've made pasta myself on occasion but never had it when in Italy, so I asked Jennifer who has lived in Italy, if she had. She had, but only with families on special occasions. Italians eat a lot of pasta, as you might expect, but mostly they buy pasta from the store.
Then I thought of an equivalent situation here in Canada, and thought of bread. People can make it themselves but most choose to buy it from the store. But then, that comparison is flawed because we buy perfectly wonderful freshly baked bread from the store - arguably better than we could make at home.
So here is my controversial query; is freshly made pasta really worth all that extra effort, or is the key to the pasta dish in the sauce? (I can here people sharpening their pencils as I type!).
Or is it the sense of achievement and joy garnered from having made something from scratch with our own two hands?
Reply to this I love Italian food and I cook a lot of it ;-) Having said that I never had pasta in Italy haha At home I simply buy fresh pasta in the supermarket and it taste far better than the dried one. So my conclusion would be that it is better to make it fresh if you can be bothered;-)
As far as gnocchi is concerned we have a similar 'dish' in Poland called kopytka and it is made in exactly the same way - very easy;-)
Reply to this Jason,
Yes it's worth to make it at home. I do my own pasta every single time and my boys love it. It's not just the ingredients you put in it but love us well. And of course it's taste better 😉
Reply to this I made homemade pasta today. It certainly was better than the ones I buy, even the fancy ones that I cant resist buying because the packaging looks so good.
Whether making pasta and bread at home is worth the time depends on whether cooking is one of the ways you express your creative side. Nobody is just funcional, so everybody expresses their creativity in some way.
I also made bread today. I do that a lot, and it is at least as good as what can be bought in the bakery. There are a few techniques to making really good bread. The most important being to keep the oven filled with steam, while the bread is rising and baking. If you dont have a steam injector in your oven, you can just pour water into the bottom of the oven, while baking the bread, as well as having a container of water in the oven.
Reply to this Wow Mell, I did not know about that you have to steam the oven with water to make good bread. Good idea. I'll try it this way, as I tried few times and never got it well.
Cheers,
m.
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