Learning to Cook – Why I Make so Much Pasta

I didn’t really cook a single thing until I was 20. I’m not really sure why – my parents both cooked (most things quite well), as did basically everyone in my family. I grew up appreciating food, but not cooking. Instead, I stayed in the basement playing video games until dinner was actually ready.

Maybe because of this, the things I cook well aren’t at all what my parents cook. If I could make my mom’s beef and noodles or my dad’s pizza, I’d be pretty happy. Frankly, I’ve never tried.

Why I Make Pasta

What I cook is Italian pasta. That’s because I only learned to cook out of necessity right before I went to study abroad in Florence. I say “learned to cook” in this instance, but that’s not accurate. I cooked 2 different pastas using Epicurious recipes that I wouldn’t even look at today a few days before I got on a plane to just ensure that I wouldn’t die when I landed and had to fend for myself or go (more) broke.

My apartment, with 3 other American dudes who weren’t much more confident in cooking than me, was thankfully right by a grocery store called Esselunga. It was, thankfully, a pretty normal grocery store. On my first day in Florence I went to the grocery store to stock the apartment with the ingredients for the 2 things I could make. Turns out, they weren’t as easy-to-find or cheap as I expected, so I called an audible. I basically just bought pasta, tomato paste, hard cheese, and fresh vegetables that I didn’t hate and figured I’d just throw it together to survive. We would get cheap packs of cured meat each week to get some protein. The apartment, for some reason, had lots of dried herbs.

Learning in Florence

My first attempts at this were…not great.If memory serves properly, this period involved eating what amounted to pasta with accidentally-fried onions and limp salami, pasta with really just cheese grated on it and some dried herbs tossed on, and pasta with too-raw tomatoes and too-crispy prosciutto. But I was learning what things actually tasted like and, more importantly, what seemed to work together. I started naturally learning to balance salt, fat, acid, and heat (see what I did there?). And I started gaining confidence and paying a lot more attention to the kitchens around the city.

The first thing I remember really putting together was how the spicy sauces in Italy actually worked. I had basically been dumping chili flakes in the sauce late and then tossing with pasta, and there was no depth. But putting just a few chili flakes in early on, and letting then infuse as the oil got hot, was a revelation. This was around the same time that I started finding the sweet spot for how long to cook aromatics early on. Too little time gave too much bite, and too much time had too much sweetness. So, all at around the same time, my sauce base was finally coming together and doing wonders for my cooking. I started getting a little more ambitious, and the results improved.

Recipes That Worked

One of the best things I made was essentially a penne arrabiata with crispy lardons. I almost burned down the apartment, which happened right as one of my roommates walked in, but it was definitely worth it.

The other best thing I made was a red wine pork ragout. It’s simple, an aromatic broth made entirely of red wine, onions, garlic, herbs, tomatoes, and some tomato paste with braised pork chunks spooned over pasta and topped with lots of cheese. I got the recipe from the guy who ran our school. And by recipe, I mean he described a dish he made frequently in colder weather in general terms. It took some trial and error to get it to a place I liked, but after a week or so of trying pretty much every day I was dialed-in.

Bringing it Home

I still make this, and it still gets rave reviews. It’s the first thing I made when I got back to the US to prove to my girlfriend (now wife) that I could actually cook now. I think I still make it primarily to prove to myself that I can still cook, since I don’t do it very often these days (since my wife is an amazing cook).

I’ve been able to translate these few things that I really figured out in Italy to a relatively unique cooking style that results in me being able to throw a pasta together with just about anything. I made an awesome salmon pasta a few months ago to avoid some salmon going to waste. I look at recipes for ideas, but I don’t really follow them. They aren’t how I actually learned to cook, and they tend to hold me back. I’m not this way at all with cocktails, primarily because I learned cocktails by reading books and following the classic ratios.

I learned to cook by immersion and a complete lack of fear of failure. It took a while, and it wasn’t pretty getting there, but it’s served me well. I’d love to find a new skill to try to learn that way.