An a-Z of Pasta

It is the way they pleat and fold that makes them so satisfying. First on the plate and then again in your mouth. Pappardelle are typical of all the central and central-northern Italian regions, each one boasting a slightly different width, anything from 2.5 to 6cm. The Tuscans gave it the name; it comes from pappare, the colloquial, to eat. Fresh

While classic ridged penne are the widely consumed favourites, and Italy’s second most sold shape, there are penne variations. Bigger pennoni (my favourite of the family), and in descending order of size siblings, pennette, pennine and pennettine, also mezze penne, half sized, which are ideal with peas, lemon and mascarpone.

The painful truth is the star side of the box grater is the best one. It produces fat crumbs that melt differently to those made by a microplane, and this is particularly important when the crumbs are an ingredient in, say, cacio e pepe.

The basis is clear: cooked chickpeas are added to some sort of soffritto (that is, the finely diced mix of onion, celery and carrot fried in oil), water or chickpea cooking liquid added, everything simmered with pasta added towards the end. Beyond this, the variations are endless and it is up to you. Pasta e ceci can be brothy or creamy; can includ

linguine (also known as bavette or trenette), so called because the oval cross-section of each strand means it resembles a lingua, a tongue,

The way pasta is cooked in Campania and Naples is beautiful choreography. Often, pasta is removed from the boiling water – usually with a spider sieve – before it reaches the desirable point of al dente. This means that the last minutes of pasta cooking are done in with the sauce. In these last minutes, usually in a pan large enough to really jolt

1 litre of boiling water and 10g of coarse salt (5g of fine) for every 100g of pasta. I find it useful to have a pasta pan so familiar I know the water levels for 3, 4 and 5 litres, and a spoon that holds 10g of coarse salt. If as a rule you cook a 500g packet of pasta it is not a bad idea to weigh out 50g of coarse salt as an example, then stare a

I now realize that strong opinions about ragù, or any dish for that matter, are expressions of nostalgia. That repeating them is almost as comforting as eating the dish because it’s another way of saying this is the way I know this is and how I hope it will stay.

Hard or durum wheat, Triticum durum, grano duro, is the hardest variety of wheat. High in protein, durum’s hardness mustn’t be confused with what we consider ‘hard’ wheat in English, that is, high-protein bread flour, but rather refers to the fact that it is stubborn and resistant to milling, eventually reducing to a granular texture the colour of