The secret to a great pasta dish

‘A great pasta dish starts with using good pasta,’ says Abraham P. Cipriano Jr., Doña Elena vice president for marketing. ‘Doña Elena Al Dente Pasta is the only authentic Italian artisan-quality pasta brand in the Philippines.’

MANILA, Philippines - Who does not know how to cook pasta? It’s probably one of the first dishes you learned to cook. It’s quite simple and easy to prepare. Still, you, too, must have had your hits and misses. How many times did your pasta end up too soggy or even perhaps undercooked?  We’re told that well-cooked pasta has to be firm to the bite or, as the Italians would say, “al dente.”  But that’s easier said than done. Not all pastas are created equal.

“A great pasta dish starts with using good pasta,” says Abraham P. Cipriano Jr., Doña Elena vice president for marketing. “Doña Elena Al Dente Pasta is the only authentic Italian artisan-quality pasta brand in the Philippines.  It’s made of 100-percent durum wheat semolina, which is the hardest of all wheat varieties. It is the use of durum wheat that makes pasta al dente, or firm to the bite. There is an Italian law that actually prescribes that pasta must be made using 100-percent durum wheat semolina. The pasta is slow-cooked, preserving more nutrients in the process. It has the highest protein content, at 13 percent.  Doña Elena uses all-natural, GMO-free ingredients in its pasta.”

Doña Elena Al Dente Pasta is made using traditional bronze die. “This gives the pasta a rough surface or ridges, which helps the sauce cling better to the noodles for a richer flavor,” explains Doña Elena product manager Karen Anne Saguiped. The die determines the final shape of the pasta. There are over 600 shapes of pasta, and their names are descriptive of their shapes.

The wide variety of shapes provides countless possibilities for creating recipes best suited for the particular shape. There is such a thing as pasta and sauce pairing. Long and skinny pastas, such as spaghetti, and long ribbons, such as fettuccine, would go well with cream- and oil-based sauces, as well as rich, meaty sauces. Lighter, smooth sauces will cling well to corkscrew-shaped pasta such as fusilli. Tube pasta such as penne is often tossed with a hearty sauce or baked like lasagna, which is wide and flat pasta with curly edges that help hold the sauce. Doña Elena Al Dente Pasta is available in five variants: Fettuccine, Penne Rigate, Fusilli, Spaghetti, and Lasagna.

Doña Elena Al Dente Pasta recently held a “Pasta-rrific Festival” at the Mall of Asia to celebrate World Pasta Month in October. The celebration was first held in Rome in 1995 with the First World Pasta Congress, and it has since become a global celebration. In the Philippines, Doña Elena Al Dente Pasta takes the lead in the campaign.

“We aim to bring great quality pasta to Filipino homes,” Cipriano says. “We want to get more people to appreciate pasta, to expand their horizons and elevate ways of cooking pasta.  “When we were kids, we just liked our sweet spaghetti sauce, then we learned to appreciate the Italian way that’s more tart and sour. Later, we tried other types of sauces such as cream and pesto and olive oil-based sauces. There’s a lot we can do with sauces, and we don’t have to be stuck with just the sweet.

“While pasta can be a convenient product, easy and quick to prepare, you can do a lot more with it given more time,” he continues. “You can put your personal touches to the ingredients. The quality of our pasta allows more room for error. It’s more forgiving. It does not become soggy, and you can have your pasta al dente all the time.”

“You have to try it to believe it,” says Larry Cochanco, Doña Elena executive vice president for marketing. “For you to like it, you have to try it.”