Photo: kennejima · CC BY 2.0 · cropped · View on Wikimedia Commons
The move — FINISHING
Giada De Laurentiis
Finish the pasta in the pan with its sauce, then wake the whole thing up off the heat with zest.
Two things, and they are the same thing. Pasta finishes in the pan with its sauce, not on a plate under it. A minute of the two cooking together, with a ladle of the starchy water, is what makes a sauce cling instead of sliding off into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl.
And then the last move, off the heat: lemon zest, or a handful of torn basil, or good oil. Something raw and bright added after the cooking has stopped. Heat flattens aromatics, so anything added while the pan is hot has already started to die. Thirty seconds off the burner and the same ingredient tastes twice as loud.
Her lemon spaghetti is built entirely on that second idea and has about five ingredients. It is a useful thing to keep in mind when a recipe starts getting complicated — most dishes are improved more by one well-timed raw addition at the end than by another cooked one in the middle.
Three dishes Giada De Laurentiis is known for
Lemon spaghetti
Her own kitchen, and the best-selling dish at her Las Vegas restaurant
She has named it herself as one of the three dishes that launched her television career, and it went on to be the top seller at her restaurant. Five ingredients, no cooking beyond boiling pasta, and it is the recipe most associated with her.
What makes it work
Zest, not just juice. Juice alone makes the sauce sour and thin; the zest carries the oils that actually smell of lemon. It goes in off the heat with good olive oil and parmesan, emulsified with pasta water. The dish is a lesson in how far you can get on timing and ratio rather than ingredients.
Baked rigatoni with mushrooms and prosciutto
A Food & Wine spread in 2001
One of the two dishes in the magazine feature that brought her to Food Network's attention. It is, in a real sense, the reason there was a television career at all.
What makes it work
A baked pasta that stays moist, which means slightly undercooking the rigatoni and building enough sauce that the dish can absorb some in the oven without drying. Prosciutto goes in late so it keeps its texture rather than dissolving.
Almond cornmeal cake
The same 2001 Food & Wine feature
The other dish from the spread that started everything. It is also the least like the rest of her repertoire — a plain Italian cake with no dressing up.
What makes it work
Cornmeal gives a sandy, open crumb that flour alone will not, and almond supplies the fat that stops it being dry. It is a cake that depends entirely on ratio. There is nothing to hide behind.
What I cook because of Giada De Laurentiis
All three finish in the pan, and all three are worse if you plate the sauce separately.
A note
Everything above is my own writing about a cook whose work changed how I cook. None of it is their recipe -- I never reproduce a recipe here, only my own account of a technique I took from watching them. The photograph is a Creative Commons image, used editorially and cropped; see the credit above. Its appearance here does not imply any endorsement, affiliation or connection between this site and the person pictured.