Thanks again to Bright Cellars for sponsoring this video and for the limited time offer! Click here bit.ly/BrightCellarsChlebowski4 to get 50% off your first 6 bottle box! Hope you all enjoyed this type of video, I would love to do another covering another food category, let me know what you want to see ✊✊
You forgot to mention one extremely important step in the plating proces. Warm up your plate! In my experience pasta can cool down very quickly if you drop it on a cold plate. Put your plate or bowl in the oven while making the dish and serve it on a warm plate when done cooking. This is the easiest of all the small details that improve your eating experience as it is the only one you can't screw up, unless you forget it.
Dude, I definitely forgot that step a few days ago. It's pretty cold where I live, but the change of season came up fast, this year. Simply forgetting that the cupboards get cold, made all my cooking efforts take a nose dive on delivery. Great reminder!
@@heyheytaytay like he said, pasta cools very quickly. On a warm plate, it stays warm until the last bite. And for dishes like carbonara or cacio e pepe, it keeps the sauce creamy. Try it!
Information sticks best with me when I understand why, notnl just what or how. It just sticks in my head and I can remember it. Finally made fantastic roasted vegetables after watching one of his videos.
Why is it better? Simple. It isn't!! He is comparing high class chefs with basic home cooks. Have you ever been to a normal restaurant around the corner? The food is just normal. Its not better or worse than you would have cooked yourself. Its just more convenient to pay, for someone to do: buying ingredients, cutting, cooking, serving, cleaning, running getting drinks. You dont pay for better food, you pay for convenience. Pasta for 8€ in the restaurant around the corner is just good/ok. Its not amazing. Pasta for 27€ at the 4,8star restaurant in your city, yes those will be amazing. When did you last make 4 potions with ingredients for 100€? Probably fucking never. Thats why this tastes like something you have never eaten before.
My go-to emulsifier for suspension-based sauces is mustard powder. It takes a _shockingly_ tiny amount, and doesn't impact the flavor whatsoever. For a big pot of sauce for the whole family, say a gallon and a half, it takes maybe a quarter to a third of a teaspoon and a quick stir, and the separated oil slick on top of the sauce just vanishes, and the whole thing gets smooth and luscious!
Wow, never heard about that!! For someone who doesn't really see mustard powder sold, could I just put some mustard seeds in a mortar and pestle and grind them up?
@@Quantickzz Yep! Though that will add a _lot_ more flavor. The pre-ground stuff is pretty flavorless, which makes it ideal for use as an emulsifier without changing the color or flavor much.
Mustard powder (and sometimes prepared mustard) is my secret ingredient in salad dressings and “au gratin” creamy cheesy baked veggie dishes (baked au gratin cauliflower, etc.). Mustard powder is my go to emulsifier-a tiny bit in a homemade vinaigrette and your dressing stays cohesive and delish ! I’ve never used it in a tomato sauce though, so love your comment as now I’m going to have to try it!
Yes mustard powder is the secret ingredient in many dishes including collard greens made with Ham Hock, the only way to keep them from being greasy when plated.
Definitely keep making vids like this, I love the food science and easy breakdown of concepts. I'd say that your channel is like 60% of the reason I've become a much better cook over the past year and a half.
I love these videos. As a young man, it was Alton Brown who really struck me and gave me the inspiration to cook, myself. Most of the time that was due to the breakdown of science, technique, method, interpretation, history, etc. You are really expanding on the aspect of "cooking media" that got me into this, in the first place.
Ethan, your videos are so well structured, written, edited and have a positive approach. It takes a lot of nuance to make these things accessible to home cooks. Thank you, mate. BTW, if you ever consider making that Torchys Diablo Sauce, I'll be looking for that notification.
@@EthanChlebowski No worries, it hit the mark, and then some. I’ve never given so much thought to pasta, but this all makes so much sense. Exceptionally well done. But then again, so are all your vids.
This channel seriously needs more subscribers with all these good insights. Not just information--INSIGHTS. Stuff that isn't obvious or typically shared by other people, and in a very organized fashion too. 1.29M subscribers isn't enough!
Ethan, I'm a huge fan, I'm learning so many things from you and your videos and I'm so glad I ended up on your channel many months ago! I'm italian (as in "from Italy") and during the whole video I was like "... we don't cook like this"; but then when I was trying to explain what was different I just... didn't know how to explain it? Italian cuisine is really deep into habits, traditions, and instinct, so it's not easy to say why the ways you cook pasta look so alien to me. So you know what? I'm perfectly ok with this video, it may be far from italian traditions, but that's fine, you never had the presumption to call it traditionally italian and I embrace different interpretations of our cuisine, it's also very informative and many of the things you explained are things I do instinctively, which will benefit those who lack this kind of "tradition-induced instinct"! P.S. just put no water in aglio e olio like we do in Italy and you'll never mess up the sauce :) I've been using a wok to make mine lately as it allows me to better dial in the quantity of oil and mix it into the pasta
My favorite thing about Ethan is that there's no ego in his videos. It's not about him - it's about the food. Not going to name names, but I feel like there's been surge in channels that rely on a loud personality rather than an informative and honest approach to food. I'm so glad I found Ethan's channel.
agreed I am sick of watching 10 min recipe videos or meal prep videos. Which honestly it's just a bunch of the same recipes derivatives of classical ones but lazier. Very little videos of actual cooking info and practical ones at that.
Your series of videos that break down the step-by-step information like this has elevated my cooking to fantastic levels. I find myself a great deal more inventive and exploratory in the kitchen, and it is all thanks to you. Thanks, Ethan. Your videos are amazing.
Excellent, comprehensive breakdown. This feels a bit like a sequel to your "why are restaurant vegetables better?" video and honestly, I'd love to see more of these, this would make for a fun series. In fact, this video easily could have had a title more in line with that previous video, like, "Why are restaurant pasta dishes so much better than homemade?" Awesome work as always Ethan 😊
Hello, great video I would like to add an element though - When I was in college I thought that pasta shape was something that I could really save some pennies and shelf space, however I think the pleasure you loose is not worth it the savings. Oil based sauces (e.g. pesto genovese; olio aglio peperoncino) -> flat string pasta like spaghetti or bucatini - you don' t really want to eat all that oil. Tomato loose sauces (e.g. puttanesca; tomato sauce) -> shaped pasta like orecchiette, penne, mezze penne - the sauce gets in the shapes Thick sauces (e.g bolognese; carbonara) -> Flat rough pasta like tagliatelle and fettuccine -grip better the little pieces of meat Soups -> ditalini, stelline - seriously I don't know why to buy them at all. As side note: Fusilli are like a "joker" in deck of cards for oil and loose sauce pasta - please no fusilli carbonara, please. Paccheri and cannelloni are nice to be stuffed. Farfalle, ruote and other arguable shapes - I highly encourage to leave them on the shelf.
Truly enjoying your more in-depth videos on techniques and food science. They seem very well balanced and provide just the right amount of information for home cooks like myself that are trying to up our game a bit while holding down a day job. Good old fashioned recipe videos are of course always appreciated, but please keep these instructional/deep-dive vids coming, too!
For me, pasta is mostly a hearty, volume meal. My sauces are deep and rich, I never skimp on the fat, and I'm plenty happy with the results. If I feel like artisanal cooking, it's not usually pasta that gets my attention, though I do make my own fresh pasta when the mood strikes and then I try for a fussier sauce.
Ok, I don't subscribe a lot, but the level of detail and what I believe is candid facts from you have converted me. The production quality is good, but that won't get me subscribing. It's always the quality of the content, and you ace that. Good job, Ethan. Never settle for less.
Thanks bud, i appreciate cooking breakdowns which are sorely absent on RU-vid despite there being 4 million cooking videos. But I have a request. Can you do one on heat control? Something I've not seen before. Overcooking/undercooking, how exactly to monitor your heat for different results ect. Thanks.
Pasta water should really always have the same salinity. Then, it is a constant, and you can easily adjust your sauce and toppings accordingly. If the pasta's saltiness varies, then you have to adjust every recipe after instead of being able to make it the same every time.
Having a chemistry background really helped me figure out these things myself. I think one thing you missed in this video is the amount of water: always use barely enough water to immerse the pasta to maximize the concentration of your starchy water. A pan is much better than a pot for boiling pasta. Restaurants use those huge pots because they cook lots of batches of pasta and the water gets very concentrated for amazing sauce creation. In fact I would argue a lot of sauces are impossible to make at home using a large pot and lots of water to boil pasta unless you are making huge portions for a party. And BTW, the "grandma's way" of adding olive oil into the water doesn't work. I really really love Carbonara because it's entirely self-contained and fool-proof. You don't need to add any extra fat, salt, and emulsifier because every component to make good pasta is built-in to the ingredients. I generally don't like the idea of traditional water-based pasta sauce because it's just plain inferior to using emulsifiers/stabilizers. Making pasta sauce follows the exact same theory as making good stir-fry sauce: in traditional stir-fry technique chefs always use a starch slurry to create an emulsion to get a glistening saucy dish instead of a greasy/watery mess.
"I generally don't like the idea of traditional water-based pasta sauce because it's just plain inferior to using emulsifiers/stabilizers." Starchy water is an emulsifier. So pasta water is an emulsifier by definition as it is starchy water. You even say it yourself in the last sentence. Use starchy water (starch slurry). So you're saying your method of using starchy water is inferior somehow to other techniques?
hi, just subscribed, because you say a lot of right things regarding Italian food. And you say it clearly, no bs... my compliments to you! One thing, if you don't mind... there is NO WAY that any pasta will taste good if salt is added only at the end... no way: it has to be in the water where it boils. The quantity of salt, yes, depends on the type of sauce and the quantity of water used (little water, salty sausage, add parmesan too = little salt to begin with). Don't use ready made sauces... please... while it is so easy to make one! One thing is a tomato "passata" (sort of pureed tomatoes). I read below that several folks mention warming up plates: in the book I'm writing (yeah, sort of... started 3 or 4 years ago...) I mention it as one of the ESSENTIAL tricks, some that I've been doing since I was 17 (and that was in 1967... ;-) and so far never heard about it, even in the countless cookbooks I read (many written by famous chefs!). All guests I had for lunch or dinner did appreciated it, and after many years still doing it themselves.
Some other easy tricks to increase your pasta flavor are: - add beef stock to your cooking water rather than (just) salt. I tend to throw in 1/2 a cube of knor bouillon and only salt my pasta after it is cooked and rinsed. - include a ballance of all basic tastes (salt, sweet, sour, bitter [and umame]) in your dish. I add a bit of nutmeg, dried basil (both add a bit bitterness), vinegar, ketchup (adds sweet) and fish sauce to my spaghetti tomato sauce. - include some type of onion, sjalot and/or garlic to your sauce (if somehow you weren't) These tricks make your pasta taste much richer.
Thank you so much for this, love this type of video. I feel like home cooks like me learn to really cook by thinking like a chef and understanding why you're doing what you're doing rather than just following recipes. Definitely make this a series!
Pasta is incredibly hard to learn the first time. But when you’ve made your first successful “pasta”, you will ALWAYS make great pasta for the rest of your life even if blindfolded
Pasta hard? Just boil water, add salt, add pasta, wait 9 minutes (or the pasta type time on the package), and done. Seriously how is this difficult? It's super basic stuff
@@seileen1234 can you eat that on its own? Pasta has a sauce. It takes many many tries to finish a savory, restaurant style “pasta” instead of the kiddie pasta at dennys you come up with on your first 5 tries.
@@jerolvilladolid I'm Italian. Just take some olive oil, garlic, tomato sauce and basil. Takes literally the time of the pasta to make, super easy and fast and really tasty. Another one? Just chop one onion, use some olive oil, and some canned tuna. Same time as above Oh, and you know we eat pasta with just some butter and parmigiano? Or just with olive oil? Yes, the horror! No garlic, no bacon, no tomato, no parsil, no strange techniques or other bullshit fake Italian ingredients. Just put butter and cheese over coocked pasta, it's simple but good, so yes, you can do it. Italian cuisine is simple but everyone outside Italy seems to have the need to overcomplicate everything, so please, just follow the ultra basic instruction and your cuisine will be unironically more Italian than Gordon Ramsey or Jamie Oliver as those people for example add oil to the pasta water (jesus christ wtf) just to appear fancy. It's just useless and stupid, like garlic or onions in carbonara
Absolutely love the mention of Marc Vetri in this video. That man LOVES pasta and can create beautiful dishes and recipes. I've met him in person and I cant want to finally go to his restaurant when it reopens.
Ethan, you remind me a little of Alton Brown, and that warms my heart. I am a long time (many years) fan of Good Eats and watch the repeats whenever possible. I am having trouble imagining how I might incorporate some of your ideas from this episode into our family meals. I am the grandmother in a household of six. Three grandsons between 8 and 13 means pasta night is 3 lbs of pasta cooked in whatever way seems most expedient. I think your sauce suggestions are helpful but I think I will never again be saucing a small single serving of pasta in a skillet ever again. Who knows though, life always has surprises.
Good show as always. Just another perspective: I dont think its right to modulate the amount of salt in the water depending on the final prep. The right amount of salt will take any pasta from being bland on its own to have sufficient flavor to hold its own, however it should never be explicitly salty. This means that if the sauce and any other additions render the dish too salty, the adjustments need to sit with those components and not the amount of salt in the water.
I loved this video. I was surprised at how much difference it made using better pasta. I had always thought the brand didn’t matter so much until Alex’s videos. I appreciate all the tips.
Super helpful! I found this channel when someone one on Reddit recommended it & subscribed right away. Thanks for making this stuff seem accessible to home cooks!
I loved this video. My goal is to better understand the chemistry of good food preparation, and I think you understand the importance of that information..
Yes I like this kind of video. Yes it's a little bit whelming to some people. I looked for simplification in the description and man you have everything there. Well done. You might add a link for Hey is this complicated? This video link will give you a simpler recipe. Then you can go from there. Your wine tips are good too. Thinking about it, you didn't mention putting wine in any of the pasta recipes for types of pasta. This is all lavniappe. I'd like to think about types of pasta, especially those I have never used, and the question, What type of sauce / presentation would go with this one?
Thank you for breaking it down like that. That is really, really helpful. I'm going to be printing out screenshots of those charts. {Unless you have printable versions of them somewhere that I don't know about??} I LOVE pasta and I'm always trying to improve my skills, so this is wonderful!! I've also appreciated other breakdowns you've down about salads, sandwiches, etc. Thinking of dishes in terms of components and ratios rather than ingredients gives homecooks the confidence to cook intuitively (and swap out ingredients) once they've learned the components and ratios of a dish. You are doing great things for us! Thank you!
This video is very focused on European style pasta, does anything change when looking at Asian styles? (outside of potato starch as a thickener, is there anything else different?)
Your channel is amazing! Your experiment-based videos are very thorough, and your mustache is one of the best mustaches I see on RU-vid. I am never disappointed when I watch your videos. Keep up the great work! You are one of the main reasons I grew a mustache
Like Jonny said - great deep dive with lots of references to dive further - was married to an Italian woman who actually was a better cook than her mother, which is rare, and though she didn’t teach me I learned a lot from watching but now know some more about the finer points of layering
It's incredible how your videos continue to get better and better. Just when I think they are amazing, you take things up to another level. This video was an absolute pleasure to watch. I would definitely love to see more videos like this one in the future.
Hello Ethan, I have a question that keeps coming up when I watch some of your videos and other cooking videos -- what defines a "better" ingredient? What makes something "higher quality?" Many brands will gladly tell us that their ingredient is higher quality. Many brands will gladly imply quality by charging a higher dollar value. But what actually is "higher quality?" How can we tell?
Great video and content Ethan. I would like to note that it's traditional to use pecorino cheese in carbonara instead of parmigiana (8:44 in the video). Italians might kill you for that! 😂
my pasta tastes better than restaurants, i use butter in my pasta water so the pasta doesn't stick and that also adds saltiness, also after the pasta is cooked just add a creamy cup of soup sachet for seasoning stir through and the turn it all off, put in on another surface to settle for 5 mins and grate and stir though some stronger than normal cheese, if you don't have anything fancy then "tasty cheese" is more than fine, let it settle and then plate it up. also remember i am a 6"2 male meat eater so pasta is almost ALWAYS a side for me, my favourite mains that i cook for the pasta is medium-rare steak or bratworst suasages...but even something like fried mince is fine.just make sure it is well cooked to the point of caramalization, of as fancy people say "the Malliard effect".
I was so confused when I clicked on the video and was immediately presented with an ad... That had Ethan in it (Home Lore by Rocket Learn, I think it was). Then it just carried on to the video like normal. Was very much caught off guard lol.
Not to toot my own horn. I come from an Italian family and have been making red sauce (tomatoe based) for atleast 10+ years. I heavily compare restaurant red sauces to my own. And 8/10 I'm disappointed in the restaurant sauces. Side note, parmesan pecorino vs parmesan reggiano would be a good comparison video.
The pasta I make for myself at home tastes better to me than restaurant pasta, because I make it to my taste while the restaurant pasta has a sort of generic-y flat taste (and not enough topping for my taste). Though I also don't really care about plating
If you use a jarred sauce, it is no wonder the sauce is not very good. Try using either fresh or canned whole peeled tomatoes, a little tomato paste, pasta water, and if any herbs or spices are needed then ass them. Use fresh herbs if available. and add the pasta to the sauce in the pan in which you are preparing the sauce. Use only genuine hard cheeses from Italy Parmigiana Reggiano or pecorino Romana.
I love to make a 5 Cheese Mariara copy-cat recipe from Olive Garden but it still doesn't turn out perfectly. I think I may not be using enough oil but I'm not sure. How would you go about layering the fats on it? For reference it is a sauce with 2 cans of Marinara, 1 can of Alfredo, 1 cup of ricotta, and a little bit more cheeses here and there, I think the total of the cheeses is 2 cups.
I rarely add salt to anything - because when I do eat "bad" food I know it is soaked in salt - my taste buds are now enjoying a more pure taste when I eat my own cooking - just ... a hem .... food for thought.
My secret ingredient when making most pasta dishes is using chicken broth or stock. It’s been a game changer in adding flavor. Don’t be upset with me Italians 🙊🙈.
Great tips but I've consistently found that home-made pasta is actually better. Either by me or by most of my friends and their families (italians being compared to italian restaurants). I'm actually annoyed at having to pay for pasta in a restaurant.
