Pasta Fresca

Written by Rosemary Mantini | 04 November 2008

Looking to tone up for spring? Try the new Venice Workout. Here’s what you do. Step one, fly to Venice (landing on a Friday in August will ensure high intensity). Step two, try to find accommodations and restaurant seating without pre-booking. By the time you dodge the throngs of tourists and navigate the city’s nine billion stairs, you’ll have shed at least ten pounds.

I should know: I did when I tried it out on the first day of a three-week stay in Italy last summer. Tae Bo is so yesterday. In any case, this workout will leave you (as it left me) more than a tad peckish.

One thing you don’t want to do in Italy is eat at restaurants offering tourist menus — pasta and pizza both heavy on sauce and cheese, along with other exotic treats like hot dogs and hamburgers. On that hot, humid afternoon, I had spaghetti covered with shrimp, clams and calamari chased with the local wine. Not bad. But it wasn’t what I knew Italian pasta could be.

In search of the sublime

By the next morning, we’d had enough of our 200-euros-a-night hotel room and the swarms of mosquitoes and tourists (equally annoying). We piled into our van and headed south for six hours toward the perfectly temperate climate of Abruzzo, a region situated on the Adriatic coast, and into the city of Teramo, population 52,000.

As beautiful as Venice was, it had felt somehow lifeless. It seemed so surreal that I thought Disney’s architects had created it. In Teramo, you walk down the street shoulder to shoulder with the locals. The architecture displays an easy marriage of history and modernity. Medieval frescoes grace the underside of roof overhangs. Crumbling ancient Roman walls aren’t knocked down; they’ve been restored and fused to modern architecture.

Walking through the central piazza, closed off to cars, I felt like I’d eaten some kind of magic truffle. In fact, it was just the tantalizing aromas wafting out of local restaurants. Grilled seafood caught early that morning, wine reducing in a pan with onions, garlic, a little tomato, maybe even a peperoncino — the fiery hot chili that’s a local favourite — added to orecchiette or spaghetti. The outstanding pasta that’s made here reflects the area’s 3,000-year-old connection to land and sea.

Caesar to Brutus: Let’s do lunch!

Contrary to popular belief, Marco Polo did not introduce pasta to Italy. It’s been around at least since the first century CE. Early writings describe a paste made with flour and water that’s formed then boiled in water. It was probably dressed with olive oil, pecorino (cheese made from sheep’s milk) and maybe vegetables, fish and other available ingredients before they realized that the tomato (a member of the deadly nightshade family, introduced to Italy in the sixteenth century) was actually edible and quite delicious.

The king of pasta

A truly national food, pasta has particular characteristics depending on where it’s made. Abruzzo is reputed to produce the best pasta because the crisp, clean water that springs from the Appennini mountain range running through the heart of the region is used to make it.

The region also experiences an ideal growing season for wheat. Planting can begin as early as February and the heat of summer warms the land until November. The hard durum wheat is nurtured by this climate until maturity when its natural sugars are perfectly developed. Its flavour is reminiscent of a good prosecco — biscuity and yeasty.

If you’ve never had good-quality pasta, it’s hard to imagine what the fuss is all about. You can’t overcook this stuff. Artisanal pasta is dried for 56 hours on average, as opposed to commercially made pasta that’s only allowed to dry for about 8 hours. Drying it for a longer time reduces the moisture content considerably. The end result is firm pasta with a consistency that resembles elastic rather than plastic once cooked. The texture remains firm and any sauce you use soaks right in.

Speaking of sauce, Italians love their pasta very lightly dressed. Making soup out of a good plate of penne arrabiata is not an option here. Do that and you’re likely to see a dumbfounded local shaking his head and muttering, “Madonna!” — the Italian equivalent of “Oh, for God’s sake!” They even have a name for the perfectly sauced dish: pasta asciutta or dry pasta.