Frankly, I prefer dry pasta over fresh. It is a lot of effort to make, and i don’t find it anything special.
Years ago, I bought a pasta machine at a yard sale-never used. Now it sits in my basement…never used!
There must be a reason for this-you see these machines at yard sales all the time.
Yeah, this was my thought, too. If you can’t tell the difference in texture, you may have overcooked the fresh stuff – most people don’t realize it cooks completely differently than dried, literally only a minute or two for fresh pasta.
Of course they’re different foods, and fresh pasta is sublime in the right dish. However, the vast majority of non-stuffed pasta dishes are better with dried pasta. Too many people have a knee-jerk “fresh pasta is always better” reaction that drives me up the wall.
Exactly. Which is what I said in my first post. It just seemed to me that you had the reverse opinion, that by quoting a Real Italian Chef saying fresh pasta is for “tourists” you were implying that real Italians eat dry pasta. Tell that to the folks of the Emilia-Romagna or Piedmont region of Italy. Fresh pasta tends to be more popular with Northern Italian cooking. Dry pasta tends to be more popular with Southern Italian cooking (which is what most Americans are used to.) I’m guessing the Italian chef you heard that comment from hails from the south of Italy.
I have to agree, tortellini or ravioli made fresh is amazing, but ‘long noodles’ as my goddaughter calls spaghetti and linguini is better dried. I find that capellini/angel hair nests are good fresh or dried, as long as the cooking time and saucing are proper.
I think it depends on what you’re topping it with. If I’m getting a simple sauce with just butter and shaved truffles (or even just shaved cheese), fresh noodles win out. If I’m eating something with a heavy “Sunday gravy” type of sauce, dried pasta wins out. It completely depends on the preparation, and I wouldn’t at all say that the “vast majority” of non-stuffed pasta dishes are better with dried pasta. It depends on what kind of non-stuffed pasta dishes you’re used to.
Heh.
I’ve got this cookbook, I forget which group wrote it, but they take some kind of quasi(?)-scientific approach to some cuisine questions. They said that their taste tests reveal a general preference for dried pasta, not fresh. The fresh stuff, they said, seemed to come out mushy and flavorless (IIRC).
Here’s the apparent source of the “pasta is for tourists” quote. I bet dollars to donuts that chef comes from a Southern Italian tradition.
I love fresh pasta. It’s expensive so I reserve it for special occasions, but they truly bring up a notch any dish that features it.
This does reminds me, however, of how in almost all chef shows, like Ramsey’s Hell’s kitchen, if ANYONE of the contestants dares to make a pasta dish without fresh pasta they’ve made, they’ll get yelled at 9 times out of 10, but back at the restaurant, you can clearly see them serving dry pasta to customers.
Three of us made it once years ago and it was a bit of a pain, what with the mixing and slicing and laying out on a rack and waiting for it to dry. It was, however, by and far the most absolutely delicious pasta I’ve ever had in my life.
Sadly, those gorgeous twins and the receipe are now all very much in the past.
I also have recently aquired the attachments to my KitchenAid, but had a completely different experience using the same recipe in the booklet. I found it easier to make than I expected and better tasting than any dried pasta I have ever had - but as noted earlier by another poster, I do like the eggy taste so maybe it’s that? I also froze some of my 1st batch and cooked from frozen later which was equally delicious.
A member of my family once said to me that dried pasta is a platform to highlight a delicious sauce, and fresh pasta is the highlight itself and so deserving of a simple sauce to compliment, not drown. So creamy, tomatoey sauces go with dried pasta, simple sauces like Aglio Olio Pepperoncino go with fresh.
I never gave this any weight until recently, but it makes perfect sense now.
I wasn’t implying that Italians only eat dried, I’m implying that pasta fresca was put on a ton of menus in the 70s and 80s, and was the high-end Italian equivalent of Caribbean rum drinks. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, it’s was (and sometimes still is) way over utilized. What tradition Marenzi was born to is largely irrelevant.
Re-read my first post on the subject, where I defend both dried and fresh pasta. Marenzi’s tradition is relevant in the sense that your post implied (to me, at any rate) in quoting somebody as an Italian chef, and therefore some sort of authority, that fresh pasta is somehow only something that “tourists” eat, when it is, in fact, not at all the case. It is an important part of the Northern Italian tradition. It is quite possible that Marenzi called it “tourist” pasta because he comes from a region of Italy where dried pasta is the dominant tradition.
I’m one of those people who like fresh pasta better than dried. It’s expensive so we never buy some, and when I realize I could make it myself, it was too much of a bother to make enough by hand so I only make some once. It was soooo good though.
And just today we bought one of those simple manual pasta making machine, like we had seen in a friend’s house, so I predict some tasty recipes being done this week. 
We can only buy the cheapest dry pasta kinds, since we’re really hurting for money these last weeks, so it’s cheaper to buy the ingredients and make pasta myself, and I know it’ll taste (for us anyway) way better.
And I agree that with fresh pasta, we don’t drench them in heavy sauce, whereas with dried pasta, even more so the cheap kind, I’ll often cook them not in water but in homemade seasonned tomato sauce, or in homemade or store bought beef broth, to give them some taste.
I’ve already acknowledged that Italians eat fresh pasta. I’ve always known that to be the case, and I have first hand experience, both in Italy and in professional kitchens, of what Italians eat. My point, which I’ve already clarified, is that it was an extremely trendy dish for a long time, and it’s importance in Italian cuisine was, and continues to be, way overstated.
I never accused you of looking down on dried pasta, so I’m not sure what that part means.
ETA: Marenzi certainly was an authority on Italian food, especially as it pertained to both fresh and dry pasta. He forgot more than most chefs will ever know on the subject.
I can pretty much definitively say that fresh, toothsome, thicker, Pasta/Egg Noodles in the German and Eastern European tradition are much much better than the thin and wimpy, wavy, flaccid dried and packaged, commercial, egg noodles. These kinds of homemade noodles are intrinsic to a good Amish or Midwest style Chicken and Noodles and frankly necessary to the development of the starchieness, viscosity, and thickness of a sauce/soup- Dried egg noodles are inferior in every way for this process (even the ‘homemade’ dried, specialty, Amish egg noodles). The thing is that you don’t need a pasta maker to make these primal noodles and they needn’t be fancy, simply roll your pasta dough to a decent eighth to a quarter inch toothsomeness and fold and cut with a knife or make squares similar to the Italian Rag pasta or paparadelle.
I don’t think we disagree, but your first post in this thread does not come across as your follow-up posts do. I can’t read it in any other way that it sounding like a put-down of fresh pasta, and something that No Real Italian ™ would eat. Yes, you’ve clarified since. That’s not at all how the initial post came across, at least to me.
It is a bit of a put-down, in that it’s meant to knock fresh pasta off of the pedestal upon which many people have placed it. Admittedly, it probably doesn’t come across as well in this context as it did between two chefs who both understood the importance and origins of Italian pasta.
This. One is only better than the other if you like it. I like it just because it’s different. I like variety, so it’s the increase in variety that’s ‘better’, not necessarily any singular foodstuff.