The Thing Most Chefs Were NEVER Taught About Pasta

My grandmother said "never make gnocchi when your heart is sad — they'll sink and never come to the boil".

So every morning in my first restaurant I blasted Andrea Bocelli through the speakers, thirty kilos of gnocchi to get through before lunch service, the music leaking out through the windows onto the street. People knew what was coming. 

At 19 I bought my first restaurant with my brother. Exciting, terrifying, formative. But 10 years in a professional kitchen taught me something my nonna and my mum couldn't: that passion alone isn't enough.

You also need understanding.

In those ten years, everything shifted. MasterChef happened. Low-carb happened. Suddenly every client was an expert, and pasta — the thing that is the heart of the table, the one dish no one questions -ever, the thing Italian nonnas ate every single day while somehow outliving almost everyone else on earth — became the villain.

Me in my first restaurant with my brother - La tavola, I was 19!

I thought I knew pasta. Ten years in a professional kitchen, Calabrian blood, a mum who never measured anything. Turns out I was missing the most important part.

I grew up in a Calabrian family where pasta didn't just sit on the table — it organised the whole day around itself. In the south of Italy especially, cooking is rustic, instinctive, loud. Nothing like the delicate cooking of the North. I grew up on a farm where summers were for working and winters were when family dinners got slower and more purposeful. Everything revolved around food. I lived it, I breathed it, I loved it.

I couldn't just say "it's not bad for you...nonna said so" anymore.

I needed proof.

MY UNDERSTANDING CAME IN THE FORM OF CHEF WALTER.

I moved to Italy and watched his hands move through every dough, every cut, every shape with a precision I'd never seen. He didn't just teach me recipes. He taught me P a s t a - the greatest story i’d ever read — through time, through land, through history, through seasons.

He showed me why, both scientifically and philosophically, a simple dough of flour and water can be a perfect meal for body, mind, and soul.

He took my rustic dishes and gave them depth.

He took my rustic mind and organised it.

Everything fell into a clear reason. That is what pasta really is.

It's a story of time and place that has the power to make you feel ‘belonging’.

This is what most kitchens don't get.

HOW DID PASTA BECOME THE VILLAIN?

I've taught all over the world. I've travelled with people from dozens of countries, walks of life, kitchens, backgrounds. And the question that keeps coming up, in different languages and accents but always the same shape, is this:

How did something this beautiful get so badly butchered, and why did I ever believe the nonsense?

Part of it is the diet industry, obviously. Carbs became the enemy.

Glycemic index became the daily measure of how to live. We Westerners are very good at this — finding the new trend, believing it will solve everything, discarding anything that doesn't fit.

The Italian approach to food has never worked this way.

Food in Italy is not fuel. It is ritual. It takes time.

And that's not nostalgia — there are real scientific reasons behind what nonna did when she made pasta. She didn't know the biochemistry. She just knew that certain things made it taste better and sit better in the body. For her, that wasn't science. That was love.

My beautiful nonna

Pasta on restaurant menus today doesn't show that love anymore. Too often it's a cheap filler, a crowd-pleaser, a box ticked. Spaghetti carbonara from north to south because the tourist will ask for it and the restaurant needs to keep people happy. I understand the pressure. But somewhere in all of that, we lost something — not just great dishes, but the whole point.

The good news? I think that's changing. The mind and body are craving the slow. People are hungry, genuinely hungry, for what their nonnas knew. Natural ingredients, seasonal cooking, food with a reason behind it. And there is no dish in the world that represents that better than fresh pasta.

EVERY PASTA SHAPE IS THE LAND ANSWERING A QUESTION

Italy is not one cuisine. It is twenty regions, twenty different histories, twenty different landscapes shaped by centuries of invasion, geography, and survival. To understand pasta is to understand this — that the dough itself was always the land's response to what was available.

In Calabria, where my family is from, we use only flour and water. Not any flour — hard wheat, semolina, grown on the hot plains of the south. The south is hot, and so the body craves cooling food. We don't want the rich, heavy egg pasta that makes perfect sense in the cold north.

We want something lighter, more alive. We were ruled by Spain for many years, which gave us the tomato — an ingredient you'll barely find in northern traditional cooking. Our pasta shapes are intricate and handmade: cavatelli, orecchiette, shapes that mothers and grandmothers rolled every morning on wooden boards.

In Sardinia they say a new bride must have a callused thumb — proof to her mother-in-law that she's ready for marriage, that she can make malloreddus properly. In Calabria, the traditional Sunday lunch is a handmade pasta — sciatelle or macaroni — tossed through pork bone ragù. Cucina povera at its most honest: the bones were pulled from the sauce, the pasta was eaten first, the bones came back as a second course. Nothing wasted. Everything loved.

When I moved to the mountains above Parma, to my village of Bedonia, I was genuinely shocked. Where were the tomato-based sauces? Where was everything I'd grown up assuming was simply Italian cooking? I was wrong, of course. Here, cow's milk is king.

Butter replaces olive oil. Filled pastas come stuffed with fresh ricotta and foraged mountain herbs, mushrooms, truffles. The flour changes and so the egg is added — it balances the delicacy of sauces where the pasta itself is the star.

some foraged mushrooms from the mountains

You cannot serve white truffle from the mountains of Alba on a semolina dough. It would be wrong. Not a crime against tradition — just wrong, the way a wine pairing can be wrong. Here you need tajarin: a fresh egg pasta made with twenty egg yolks per kilo of flour, impossibly rich, a perfect landing pad for something that rare and subtle.

And if you go to Bologna and ask for spaghetti bolognese? I'm fairly confident they will ask you to leave the country. Bolognese ragù belongs with tagliatelle — a fresh pasta that carries the sauce properly. Dried spaghetti is a central and southern pasta. It simply doesn't do what this particular sauce needs. This is not snobbery. This is the dough and the sauce talking to each other.

PASTA IS A PHILOSOPHY, NOT A TECHNIQUE.

You cannot decide your shape before you decide your ingredients. The seasons dictate the pasta you'll make. The land dictates the sauce. The sauce dictates the shape. The shape dictates whether fresh or dried, egg or water, long or short, rough or smooth.

Your most important tool is your hands. Every dough responds differently to the temperature of your palms, the strength in your arms, the mood you bring to the bench. Pasta making is my body's reset. My morning release. The place where creativity flows and the noise stops.

ONE DISH THAT SAYS EVERYTHING.

My favourite example from the north: anolini in broth. A winter staple. You make a fresh egg dough, fill it with a blend of braised beef and an almost unreasonable amount of Parmigiano Reggiano, stamp it into small rounds. In the restaurant, we make these on quiet winter mornings when the kitchen is slower — it gives the team something wholesome and unhurried to move through.

At home, it's a Sunday tradition: every child has a job. Who rolls, who cuts, who lines the tray. The pasta goes into a beautiful capon broth. On special occasions the broth is also made with good beef cuts and bones, and those boiled meats come back as a second course — with bone marrow, mostarda, salsa verde. Guests in Parma pay serious money for this at restaurants that specialise in bollito misto. And rightly so. Cucina povera, elevated by attention and seasonal ingredients and a story worth telling.

This is what pasta does when you let it. It turns bones into a meal worth remembering.

FRESH PASTA IS ALSO, FOR THE RECORD, THE EASIEST WEEKNIGHT DINNER YOU OWN.

Any mother juggling work, kids, and the chaos of real life knows this. You don't need much: flour, eggs, water, time, and some attention. What you get back is a meal with actual ingredients, made by your actual hands, that a child will remember when they are forty-five and making it for their own family.

That is the whole point.

That is what most restaurants have forgotten.

Here in the mountains of Bedonia, winter is when things go quiet — and that is exactly when we make pasta. We visit our artisan producers, bring everything back to the wooden benches of the old mill, and spend the day with our hands in the dough. In the evening we sit together and eat what we've made. If you'd like to join us for one of our pasta sessions, click https://www.melinapuntoriero.com/pastasessions