Ernesto Iaccarino thinks I cook pasta the wrong way, and that probably you do, too.
I say I have been cooking pasta longer than he has been alive. He says he is the chef at a restaurant near Sorrento, Italy, Don Alfonso 1890, and has two Michelin stars.
I have no response to that. Two Michelin stars makes him a demigod of cooking.
Seventeen others and I had the great good fortune recently to take a cooking class from Chef Iaccarino at Casa Don Alfonso restaurant in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Clayton. With his own restaurant closed for renovations, he and his brother Mario have been cooking and giving cooking classes at some of the other Don Alfonso restaurants owned by their family around the world.
We made — or rather, helped to make — two fairly simple dishes and one complex one, and each one offered the opportunity to learn tricks of cooking known to chefs with two Michelin stars and, one supposes, every household cook in the Sorrento area.
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Like that spaghetti trick (and for the record, Chef Iaccarino is far too nice to say you’re cooking pasta wrong; he just shows you the right way to do it).
Take the pasta out of the pot a few minutes before it is done cooking and put it in another pot in which you have heated olive oil, unpeeled (unpeeled!) garlic cloves, vegetable stock and some of the water you used to cook the pasta. Stir constantly until the pasta is fully cooked and has absorbed the flavor of the garlic oil.
Serve the pasta with a tomato sauce made with absolutely ripe, sweet tomatoes. In America, that generally means cherry tomatoes. Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and cook with olive oil and unpeeled (unpeeled!) garlic for about 15 minutes, adding a splash of vegetable broth after the first five minutes.
Here’s another tip: If the sauce is too liquid, don’t keep cooking it to reduce the sauce; that will overcook the tomatoes. Instead, add tomato sauce to thicken it.
And a third tip: Pass the cooked sauce through a food mill or press it through a colander. Never blend a tomato sauce in a blender, because that will incorporate air into the sauce and turn it orange. The look on his face suggested that an orange-colored tomato sauce is approximately as horrifying as an asteroid hitting the Earth, or maybe a little worse.
Incidentally, Iaccarino said that in Southern Italy, no one ever serves parmesan cheese with a tomato sauce. If guests ask for it, of course, it must be provided. But the very thought of sprinkling parmesan on a tomato sauce fills him with asteroid-level horror.
We — and by we, I basically mean Iaccarino and his cooks — also made gnocchi with a red pepper sauce. The gnocchi were incredibly light. We practically had to hold them down to keep them from floating up to the ceiling.
Gnocchi tip No. 1: Boil the potatoes, don’t roast or bake them, in order to keep the potato starch that binds them together (Casa Don Alfonso has a steamer that cooked at least a dozen Russet potatoes in just a few minutes. I was amazed).
Gnocchi tip No. 2: Don’t use all-purpose flour to create the dough, use 00 flour, which is more typically found in pizza dough. After running the potatoes through a food mill or pushing them through a colander, keep adding flour as you knead it until the dough reaches the right, pillow-soft consistency (see tip No. 3).
Gnocchi tip No. 3: The dough is ready when you can poke it with your finger and dough doesn’t stick to your finger when you pull it out.
Our third course, the most complex of the three, was strascinati, a filled tube of pasta served with a bolognese sauce. This one required the most steps and truly drove home the difference between home cooking and restaurant cooking.
For this single dish, Iaccarino and his staff made a pasta dough, a ragout, a béchamel sauce, a tomato sauce, a mozzarella sauce, a basil sauce and the bolognese.
It is an extraordinary amount of work — I can absolutely guarantee that none of us in the class is going to attempt it — but the result, a seemingly simple dish, was sublime.
Basically, it is cannelloni, and in fact strascinati is considered the mother of the Sorrento style of cannelloni. It was invented by Iaccarino’s great-grandfather, Alfonso Costanzo.
When the guy whose great-grandfather invented an entire region’s version cannelloni tells you how to make pasta, you listen.
Spaghetti Don Alfonso 1890