I make fresh tomato pasta sauces this way as well as the cheese based ones sometimes. A bit of butter and olive oil in the sauce, minimal water in with the pasta (I really like orecchiette) and finish the pasta off in the sauce with a bit of the minimal remaining water. Very clingy, very silky.
The pasta plate is called Primo Piatto meant to be eaten as the first part of the main course. The Secondo Piatto is the second part of the main course usually a meat dish, is meant to be eaten after the pasta. Hence why, the pasta course is small and needs to be small. However, there are exceptions, where pasta dishes can be the full main course on its own. The reason most italian pasta dishes are only a part of the main course is because they're not a balanced meal, and therefore will not properly feed you.
The concept of having multi-course meals is foreign to the USA both historically and culturally. The word "Entree" actually means appetizer in french, while in the USA it means main dish for whatever reason. Its even more ridiculous that USA restaurants that pretend to be fancy put "entrees" instead of "main dishes" on their menus.
> Its even more ridiculous that USA restaurants that pretend to be fancy put "entrees" instead of "main dishes" on their menus.
I smell "epic-ism": you know the French definition proximal to your own lifetime, but not the earlier one that essentially meant hearty meat courses.
Also, there were even "large entrées" from the same period. From Wikipedia[1]:
"Large joints of meat (usually beef or veal) and large whole fowl (turkey and geese) were the grandes or grosses entrées of the meal."
Maybe that definition was just from an influx of "ridiculous Americans" traveling to France during the Enlightenment so they could pretend to be fancy.
Thank you! I was totally caught off guard by the swiftness and harshness of the response to what I thought was a pretty innocent comment about the joy of Italian pasta.
If I had to guess, the pasta serving in the video was no more than about 150-200 calories. Dry pasta is 370 calories per 100g and pecorino is 390 per 100g. That serving was maybe 30g worth of pasta and maybe 10g worth of cheese.
Needless to say, that’s a snack-sized portion of pasta, not a meal.
I wouldn't sweat it. It was probably just one of our resident "transcendent biohackers" who thinks eating is an impediment to maximizing their human potential.
Stim use is an effective appetite suppressant, after all.
740 kcal of pasta and cheese went into the dish, and under half (370 kcal) ended up on that plate. People vary, but even short, old people with no exercise have a maintenance metabolism of 3x that. To maintain my weight I need 10x that.
I suspect most of the reactions here are cultural (do you get most of your calories with breakfast, are restaurant meals larger or smaller than home meals, is that the only food with the meal or do you typically have other starters and desserts, do you snack throughout the day, ...).
I typically eat once a day, sometimes adding in a small breakfast, I don't snack, I don't really care for desserts, and certainly for a weeknight meal I might make cacio e pepe but definitely won't also whip up breadsticks, cocktails, and a few sides most of the time. Nearly anyone with those eating habits would find this a small amount of food (in the sense that if they ate it instead of their normal dinner regularly they'd lose weight quickly, at least 3lbs per month, 25lbs in my case).
Even people who eat 3 square meals and snack some (no more than half a family-size bag of chips) through the day will find this on the small side (losing weight if all 3 meals are that portion) if they're moderately active, no older than 40, and no shorter than 5'10.
> Ah yes Italians, famous for being stingy with portions, feeding you the minimum portion possible.
So, this is an often [0] repeated misconception: you have to differ from family style eating, and that of professional cuisine gastronomy. The former is what you are attributing this POV, whereas a professional kitchen that focuses on the tre/quattro piatti format (prix fixe) the whole point is to provide small(er) portions between courses, often in order to get the waiter/sommelier to drop the wine card to match the palette/dish, which is where the real money is made in restaurants.
When I ran kitchens in Italy, we often sold proteins at a loss (at least the first 5-10 orders) in order to promote the local wine/vineyards that we got a massive discount on by buying half the harvest/yield seasons anf sometimes years ahead and could mark-up the bottle--it's your basic loss leader approach, and pre-service is often where these things are tweaked and refined with a very clear intention for FOH to move the booze to make up for the losses in the kitchen. The owner I worked for during this time had a family owned dairy/caseficco business where we got our cheeses where we also got lamb from as well depending on the time of year.
Its fun, to an extent, especially with weekend specials and selling out low-cost high margin dishes every night, but honestly after 3 seasons of this I realized I was just a middle man for back room deals with vineyards/distilleries that happened long before I ever worked there. I realized I preferred to cook seasonal in agrotourism settings as it hit all the goals I wanted to accomplish, and took the spot light more towards the farms/farmer, where I also worked at in the morning while working in kitchens in Europe.
Sidenote: While I had half of Sundays off and free access to a table on the slow hours (along with anything on the menu and maybe a bottle of lambrusco or prosecco on a good week) when I was in Italy, the truth is I would peddle my bike to the nona's house to eat for like 4-5 hours with a nap which had those generous portions you are mentioning.
Thanks for clearing this up because I was confused by the other comments about how multi course meals are common in Italy but unknown in the US.
So nobody in Italy is going to nonna’s house and sitting down to 10 courses of tiny amounts of pasta, proteins, vegetables, soups, and salads. They’re sitting down to one big feast with a much smaller number of dishes being passed around the table, like you’d see in The Godfather.
> So nobody in Italy is going to nonna’s house and sitting down to 10 courses of tiny amounts of pasta, proteins, vegetables, soups, and salads. They’re sitting down to one big feast with a much smaller number of dishes being passed around the table, like you’d see in The Godfather.
For the most part yeah, we ate previously opened jars of pickled veg anti-pasto, salumi and ragu while drinking non-fancy house wine, but when I was living and working with a legacy family in Maranello we'd sometimes go to Modena/Bologna/Reggio Emilia to a patrons/business partners home where expectations were different... we did a multi-course menu, but that was a business arrangement or celebration of some sort, hardly what I'd call a regular Sunday dinner.
I just liked going to the nonna's home to have whatever was made and rest for a bit and get away from work as I had already spent over 60+ hours on the farm/kitchen by weeks end.
Those days were so exhausting but incredibly fulfilling.
No way that’s 50g of carbs. They started with 150g dry pasta and the serving they plated was less than 1/5th of it. I’d be surprised if there’s 20g of carbs in that serving.
