Cooking Tip: Toast your Pasta!

I got this really neat cookbook a little while back and have been experimenting with a few of the tips listed in it. One of my favorite new culinary tricks of the trade is toasting pasta!

Toast your Pasta!

This specific recipe started out by browning ground sausage in the pan, then browning the pasta in the sausage grease. This could be done with grease from whatever meat you're cooking with, or by adding a decent amount of olive oil. Toast the pasta for a total of 8 to 10 minutes, using tongs to turn (similar to turning a breast of chicken) every 2 minutes. You'll begin to see a nice deep color form on some of the pasta- this won't happen to all of the pasta, but that's okay. It makes it look much prettier this way!

Once you've finished toasting the pasta, it can be cooked by adding water (or chicken broth in this recipe) and boiling. Don't be surprised if it takes a little longer than the pasta typically takes to cook, the darker noodles don't cook as quickly.

This will all result in a nice added flavor to your dish; there's a nice nutty hint developed in response to the toasting. As I recently picked up on a cooking show, true Italian pasta dishes are really more about the pasta than the sauce; using a higher quality pasta will give your dish a much better, finished flavor, opposed to trying to mask cheap noodles with an abundance of sauce.

Enjoy!

My dinner :)