Pasta Al Pomodoro

Twombly Family Recipe Pasta al Pomodoro Everyone enjoys pasta. It’s budget friendly, nutritious, delicious, and can be modified in a wide variety of ways. Our favorite additions include meatballs, ground beef, chicken, or sausage. Serena’s cultural and ethnic origins are from Sicily, so we make pasta her way, (I don’t argue), and it ends up being tender and delicious. INTRODUCTION This recipe is for pasta al pomodoro, also known as pasta asciutta (or pastasciutta); cooked pasta with a tomato sauce (also known as Neapolitan sauce, and referred to in Italy as Napoletana sauce). HISTORY (and etymology) First attested in English in 1874, the word "pasta" comes from Italian pasta, in turn from Latin pasta "dough, pastry cake", itself the latinisation of the Greek παστά (pasta) "barley porridge". Pasta (Italian pronunciation: [ˈpasta]) is a staple food of traditional Italian cuisine, with the first reference dating to 1154 in Sicily. The term “pasta” is commonly used to refer to the variety of pasta dishes. Pasta is typically a noodle made from an unleavened dough of a durum wheat flour mixed with water or eggs and formed into sheets or various shapes, then cooked by boiling or baking. It can also be made with flour from other cereals or grains. Pastas may be divided into two broad categories: dried (pasta secca) and fresh (pasta fresca). Twombly Family Recipe Pasta al Pomodoro Page 1 Twombly Family Recipe Most dried pasta is commercially produced via an extrusion process although it can be produced in most homes. Fresh pasta was traditionally produced by hand, sometimes with the aid of simple machines, but today many varieties of fresh pasta are also commercially produced by large-scale machines, and the products are widely available in supermarkets. Basic pasta dough is typically made of wheat flour or semolina with durum wheat. Durum wheat is used predominantly in the South of Italy and soft wheat in the North. Regionally, other grains have been used, including those from barley, buckwheat, rye, rice, and maize, as well as chestnut and chickpea flours. Image: Wheat used to produce semolina. Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain which is a worldwide staple food. Botanically, the wheat kernel is a type of fruit called a caryopsis. There are many species of wheat which together make up the genus Triticum; the most widely grown is common wheat (T. aestivum). Cultivation of wheat began to spread beyond the Fertile Crescent after about 8000 BCE. Durum wheat (Triticeae durum) was developed by artificial selection of the domesticated emmer wheat strains formerly grown in Central Europe and the Near East around 7000 BC. Durum in Latin means "hard", and the species is the hardest of all wheats. Wheat is grown on more land area than any other food crop (220.4 million hectares, 2014). World trade in wheat is greater than for all other crops combined. In 2016, world production of wheat was 749 million tonnes, making it the second most-produced cereal after maize. Since 1960, world production of wheat and other grain crops has tripled and is expected to grow further through the middle of the 21st century. Globally, wheat is the leading source of vegetal protein in human food, having a protein content of about 13%, which is relatively high compared to other major cereals and staple foods. Both dried and fresh pasta is available in a wide variety of shapes, with 310 specific forms known variably by over 1300 names having been documented. In Italy, the names of specific pasta shapes or types often vary with locale. For example, the form cavatelli is known by 28 different, names depending on region and town. Common forms of pasta include long shapes, short shapes, tubes, flat shapes and sheets, miniature soup shapes, filled or stuffed and specialty or decorative shapes. Twombly Family Recipe Pasta al Pomodoro Page 2 Twombly Family Recipe Image: Short cut pasta from the Encyclopedia of Pasta. Twombly Family Recipe Pasta al Pomodoro Page 3 Twombly Family Recipe Image: Minute pasta from the Encyclopedia of Pasta. As a category in Italian cuisine, both fresh and dried pastas are classically used in one of three kinds of prepared dishes. (1) As pasta asciutta (or pastasciutta) cooked pasta is plated and served with a complementary sauce or condiment. E.g. Spaghetti. (2) A second classification of pasta dishes is pasta in brodo in which the pasta is part of a soup-type dish. (3) A third category is pasta al forno in which the pasta incorporated into a dish that is subsequently baked. E.g. Baked ziti. In the 1st century AD writings of Horace, lagana (singular: laganum) were fine sheets of fried dough and were an everyday foodstuff. Writing in the 2nd century, Athenaeus of Naucratis provides a recipe for lagana, which he attributes to the 1st century Chrysippus of Tyana: sheets of dough made of wheat flour and the juice of crushed lettuce, then flavored with spices and deep-fried in oil. An early 5th century cookbook describes a dish called lagana that consisted of layers of dough with meat stuffing, a possible ancestor of modern-day lasagna. However, the method of cooking these sheets of dough does not correspond to our modern definition of either a fresh or dry pasta product, which only had similar basic Twombly Family Recipe Pasta al Pomodoro Page 4 Twombly Family Recipe ingredients and perhaps the shape. The first concrete information concerning pasta products in Italy dates from the 13th or 14th century. Historians have noted several lexical milestones relevant to pasta, none of which changes these basic characteristics. For example, the works of the 2nd century AD Greek physician Galen mention itrion, homogeneous compounds made of flour and water. The Jerusalem Talmud records that itrium, a kind of boiled dough, was common in Palestine from the 3rd to 5th centuries AD. A dictionary compiled by the 9th century Arab physician and lexicographer Isho bar Ali defines itriyya, the Arabic cognate, as string-like shapes made of semolina and dried before cooking. The geographical text of Muhammad al-Idrisi, compiled for the Norman King of Sicily Roger II in 1154, mentions itriyya manufactured and exported from Norman Sicily: Image: Stuffed pasta from the Encyclopedia of Pasta. Stuffed pasta originated in Norther Italy, where meats and cheeses dominate the cuisine. West of Termini there is a delightful settlement called Trabia. Its ever-flowing streams propel several mills. Here there are huge buildings in the countryside where they make vast quantities of itriyya which is exported everywhere: to Calabria, to Muslim and Christian countries. Multiple shiploads are sent. Itriyya gives rise to trie in Italian, signifying long strips such as tagliatelle and trenette. One form of itriyya with a long history is laganum (plural lagana), which in Latin refers to a thin sheet of dough, and gives rise to Italian lasagna. According to historians like Charles Perry, the Arabs adapted noodles for long journeys in the 5th century, the first written record of dry pasta. The dried pasta introduced was being produced in great quantities in Palermo at that time. Twombly Family Recipe Pasta al Pomodoro Page 5 Twombly Family Recipe Image: Ribbon cut pasta from the Encyclopedia of Pasta. There is a legend of Marco Polo importing pasta from China which originated with the Macaroni Journal, published by an association of food industries with the goal of promoting pasta in the United States. Twombly Family Recipe Pasta al Pomodoro Page 6 Twombly Family Recipe Rustichello da Pisa writes in his Travels that Marco Polo described a food similar to "lagana". Jeffrey Steingarten asserts that Arabs introduced pasta in the Emirate of Sicily in the ninth century, mentioning also that traces of pasta have been found in ancient Greece and that Jane Grigson believed the Marco Polo story to have originated in the 1920s or 30s in an advertisement for a Canadian spaghetti company. In Greek mythology, it is believed that the god Hephaestus invented a device that made strings of dough. This was the earliest reference to a pasta maker. In the 14th and 15th centuries, dried pasta became popular for its easy storage. This allowed people to store pasta on ships when exploring the New World. A century later, pasta was present around the globe during the voyages of discovery. In North Africa, a food similar to pasta, known as couscous, has been eaten for centuries. However, it lacks the distinguishing malleable nature of pasta, couscous being more akin to droplets of dough. At first, dry pasta was a luxury item in Italy because of high labor costs; durum wheat semolina had to be kneaded for a long time. Image: Boy with Spaghetti by Julius Moser, c. 1808. Pasta exhibits an amorphous (random) molecular order rather than a crystalline structure. The moisture content of dried pasta is typically around 12%, indicating that dried pasta will remain a brittle solid until it is cooked and becomes malleable. The cooked product is, as a result, softer, more flexible, and chewy. Semolina flour is the ground endosperm of durum wheat, producing granules that absorb water during heating and an increase in viscosity due to semi-reordering of starch molecules. Another major component of durum wheat is protein which plays a large role in pasta dough rheology (Ben’s academic studies, and extensive commercial industrial experience, is in the theory, design, development and application of the science of rheology and its instrumentation). Gluten proteins, which include monomeric gliadins and polymeric glutenin, make up the major protein component of durum wheat (about 75–80%). As more water is added and shear stress is applied, gluten proteins take on an elastic characteristic and begin to form strands and sheets.

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