SPRING
2021
Kitchen talks: Spaghetti with tomato sauce
Will we ever be willing, one day to twist our way of reading and order a menu again, for example starting from the second and ending with a first like pasta?
One of the brags made in Italy is undoubtedly pasta. Everywhere in the world pasta recalls the real Italian style.
To anyone who comes to eat a plate of tomato, spaghetti comes to mind our beautiful country, with its extraordinary beauties and its inexhaustible gastronomic specialties.
In history, pasta is mentioned by classic authors such as Cicero and Horatio, it was called "Lagana", from which the term lasagna derives: a dough of water and flour that was then cut to large, baked or boiled and generally seasoned with cheese.
In the Middle Ages pasta began to take its invariant forms and early production shops, but was sold exclusively as fresh pasta. We owe the Arabs, on the other hand, the invention of dry pasta, which allowed them to preserve during desert movements.
In fact, Sicily was the first Italian region from which the spread of pasta started, and only then Sardinia and Genoa.
Mainly the pasta was seasoned only with cheese or some spice, the use of tomato sauce is from Campania: Neapolitans gave birth to the classic recipe today known worldwide. It’s also here the first pastifici of Gragnano were born.
We have to wait for 1800 for pasta to become the stereotype of Italian excellence. In this respect, we must turn a particular bow to Pellegrino Artusi, father of Italian cuisine, because he did not only collect recipes around Italy and bring them together in the greatest work of Italian cuisine, but also to creating a tradition. This job really did it by giving pasta an autonomous role, introducing it as the first dish on the Italian menu.
At Shalai Resort 1 star Michelin restaurant we made an important choice right on pasta, inserting spaghetti with tomato at Shalai restaurant, not as a first dish, but as a pre-dessert on our new tasting menu.
The idea comes from the fact that in the period between July and September, the tomato enhances all its sweetness comparable to a dessert sauce.
It’s always a pleasure to read in the eyes of our guests the amazement of being in front of a tomato spaghetti as a pre-dessert, and I assure you it was a winning choice.
Credits to Chef Giovanni Santoro - Shalai Resort