Italian Cuisine

Italian cooking is the best-known cuisine in the world, and its founding idea is the opposite of what people imagine: not many spices or complicated sauces, but four or five good ingredients with nothing hiding behind anything else.

Pasta

There are more than 350 pasta shapes in Italy, and each shape suits a particular sauce: the thin ones for light sauces, the tubes for thick sauces that get inside them. And the salted, starchy pasta water is the secret ingredient that binds sauce to pasta.

Carbonara

Real carbonara has four ingredients: egg, pecorino, guanciale (cured pork cheek — we substitute smoked beef) and black pepper. No cream at all — the creaminess comes from egg yolk with pasta water.

Neapolitan pizza

A dough fermented at least 24 hours, raw San Marzano tomato sauce, mozzarella and basil, baked at 450°C for 90 seconds — which is why the rim puffs and blisters.

North and south

The north cooks with butter, rice and corn (risotto and polenta); the south with olive oil, pasta and tomato. The gap between them is wider than between many separate cuisines.