Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It by Teresa Giudice, Heather Maclean

you squirt from a can versus fresh cheese. The Italians have been making dried pasta for hundreds of years, and it tastes divine.
    Homemade vs. Store-Bought
    You know I love to make things from scratch. If I can get my hands into the food, I’m enjoying it before it even hits my mouth. I make my sauces from scratch. Joe makes our sausage from scratch. We even make our own wine. (We don’t normally stomp the grapes with our feet and dress like characters from I Love Lucy , but this year, me and Jacqueline just had to give it a try. It was too fun.)

    Of course, I also know how to make pasta from scratch. Once you know how to do it, you can have fresh pasta ready for cooking in fifteen minutes. But I usually don’t, and here’s why. The unused pasta doesn’t last as long as dried. It creates a whole bunch of extra dishes for me to wash. (And believe me, I’ve got enough dishes and clothes to wash for the next fifty years. My girls, they gotta change their outfits like three times a day. Drives me crazy!) But the most important reason I don’t regularly make my own pasta is because the stuff you can buy in the store is so inexpensive and so good, it’s not really worth the extra effort. The difference between homemade sauce and the stuff in a jar? Life-changing! The difference between rolling out your own pasta and the beautiful bags imported from Italy for two dollars? You can’t tell.
    When I do make my own, though, it’s usually for dishes that use big shapes of pasta, like lasagna, manicotti, or ravioli. You roll them out, cut them, and shape them pretty easily. But the small pastas like fusili or farfalle, those I use dried.
    Brand Name vs. Generic
    In most cases, I choose the products imported from Italy that I know are well made and not full of additives. But for pasta, you can actually go with a local brand, as long as it’s a good one.
    Mine and Joe’s favorite Italian dried pasta brand is De Cecco. It’s been made in Abruzzo by the De Cecco family for 120 years. People used to have to dry pasta in the sun until Don Filippo De Cecco invented a drying machine for those rare cloudy days. Their factory was bombed by the Germans in World War Two, but they were able to rebuild because after all the Allied soldiers fell in love with pasta, international demand for their product grew. I also like that they still use a bronze die, and I love their logo: a gorgeous, curvy Abruzzo country girl carrying wheat.
    The other dried pasta we usually buy because it tastes fantastic is Via Roma. It sounds all Italian, but it’s actually an American brand made by the A&P grocery store. Their packaging is adorable: a black-and-white picture of an elderly couple enjoying a meal. It may be a generic brand, but since A&P gave it a private label and put some thought and skill behind it, it tastes amazing.
    I’ve had friends tell me that the cheapest dried pasta on the shelves doesn’t cook up very good. My advice: spend twenty cents more and get a guaranteed winner.
        
    Designer Pasta
    Like everything, there are “designer” brands of pasta, called “artisanal pastas,” that make smaller batches of better quality and of course charge a bit more for it. But unlike shoes or cars, a box of premium pasta will cost you about seven dollars, rather than two. My favorite is Latini Classica Red Box selection by Carlo and Carla Latini. The Latini family has been farming wheat in Osimo, Italy, since 1888, and they really have perfected it with what they say on their own Web site is “genius and love.” They use bronze dies, and their pasta, even in a blind taste test, totally wins, even without any sauce at all. If I’m having fancy visitors I really want to impress, I send Joe down to the Italian market for some Latini. I’m not the only one either, since most of the best Italian restaurants in New York use Latini as well (and you thought they made it all by hand . . . I told you, it’s a pain in the ass!).
    T eresa’s
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