Exploring Common Italian Ingredients for Pasta Dishes

Pasta is one of the most iconic and versatile Italian dishes. You can choose from a wide variety of Italian ingredients for pasta and always get a different taste. 

Moreover, you can also pick healthy ingredients for seasoning pasta, which will help limit your calorie income if you want to watch your weight and still enjoy delicious meals with premium Italian ingredients.

Today, we’ll explore some of the most common Italian ingredients for pasta and explain how you can use them to create your own pasta dishes.

This way, you’ll become a pasta master, able to satisfy any palate at your table.

The 8 Most Important Ingredients for Your Pasta Dishes

Olive Oil

Olive oil has countless health benefits, but it’s also one of the most essential Italian ingredients. Many people use butter after cooking their pasta to keep them from getting glued together. However, the best way is the Italian way.

After taking your pasta out of the boiling water and leaving it to drain, it’s essential to drop a little olive oil. It’ll keep the pasta from getting sticky and add a unique olive flavor.

Tomatoes

You can’t have pasta without tomatoes in one form or another.

It can be with concentrate or sauce, but you can also use fresh tomatoes to give your dish this unique Mediterranean flavor.

What’s great about tomato is it adds texture to the dish without bringing too much of a taste. It compliments herbs, spices, and other Italian ingredients for pasta.

Cheese

With around 1.2 million tons of cow milk produced for it, the Italian cheese industry is enormous, and that’s partly because of pasta.

Cheese is essential to bring salt and a unique texture to your pasta dishes. There are several ways to incorporate it.

You can add grated cheese at the end of the process and let it melt to create the delicious cheese strings we all know and love.

However, it’s also possible to integrate it during your cooking.

Depending on the type of cheese and the rest of the preparation, you can add it to your tomato sauce-based preparation to make everything more unified when you’re browning your preparation with the pasta.

Italian cheese can be hard, like Parmigiano Reggiano; you’ll then have to grate it on top of your dish, but there’s also blue cheese and other soft cheeses.

When the cheese is soft, you can mix it easily with cooking cream to create a cheese sauce and replace the tomato sauce. 

Alternatively, you can add a bit of tomato sauce to it to blend the cheese with the pesto and other elements.

Pesto

Pesto is a classic Genovese preparation that brings a unique taste to the pasta sauce.

It can be red or green and contains a mix of pine nuts, garlic, basilica, olive oil, and cheese. Sometimes, a bit of pepper is added to the crushed mix to give it a red color.

It’s an incredibly strong flavor to add to your pasta, but you mustn’t overdo it to avoid killing the dish.

To prevent this, we recommend mixing with cooking cream or tomato sauce when it’s boiling to get a unique sauce that’ll take your pasta to the next level.

Pasta

Of course, you need pasta in your pasta dish, but which type? There are different types of pasta intended to work best with other ingredients.

For instance, squid ink pasta is the perfect choice if you decide to cook with seafood like shrimp or scallops, but it also works great with fish.

The shape also matters more than you think. More often than not, undercooked pasta is the result of choosing the wrong type of pasta for your dish.

For instance, tubular shapes are excellent if you’re preparing a soup or ragù, meaning a dish with a thick sauce. 

Eggs

Did you know that pasta can be made using eggs? It can be used to make pasta, but you can also use eggs to improve your pasta dish.

When using eggs, you can add some thickness to the preparation, and it mixes incredibly well with cheese. The result will be a dish with a creamy taste.

The eggs can also be scrambled with cheese and herbs, then added to the mixture to create a tasty meal everyone will love.

Garlic and Onions

Garlic and onions are like two twin brothers; they look alike, but they each bring something to the dish. Garlic is more powerful and needs to be crushed, mixed, or at least cut into tiny bits to avoid overpowering everything.

Onions can be cooked and caramelized and will go soft when cooked. You can cut onions into thin slices and add a bit of juice to the dish. 

Herbs and Spice

If, after adding all of these ingredients, your dish is still missing a little something, it’s probably because it’s missing herbs and spice. It’s a little touch that can go a long way in giving your dish the right flavor.

For instance, if you’re going for a pasta dish with chicken, thyme will help flavor the chicken and elevate your dish. 

It’s all about which meat or ingredients you use and finding the mix that suits your palate.

However, it’s essential to refrain from putting too many herbs and spices in your dish because these are potent flavors. 

Experiment to Put Your Spin on Pasta Dishes

Respecting the primary ingredients is only your starting point. Once you begin to master these ingredients, you can start experimenting to find the perfect taste.

Adding more or less of an ingredient can dramatically change your experience, and that’s how you’ll indeed become a pasta master.

In any case, cooking should always be about having fun and discovering new flavors, so never hesitate to try something new when an idea sparks your mind.

Pasta is highly versatile and can be mixed with all sorts of ingredients, from meat to herbs, and you can even craft delicious vegan versions of the most famous Italian pasta dishes.