Pasta

Fried slices melt into starch water and become the sauce.

Starch water emulsifies the chilli oil so the heat coats every strand.

Rendered fat plus starch water emulsifies into a sauce with no cream in it.

Starch water is the emulsifier; without it the fat just sits on the bowl.

Wide ribbons hold a coarse ragu that a thin noodle would drop.

Starch water and clam liquor emulsify. That emulsion is the sauce.

Grated roe is salt, fat and iodine at once. The starch dilutes it into sauce.

Loosen it with pasta water off the heat and it becomes a sauce.

The starch water is the emulsifier. Without it the cheese seizes to rubber.

Starch carries salt. Nothing else distributes umami this evenly.

It melts to cream unaided. The sauce is the cheese plus heat.

Fresh pasta is flour and yolk. The dough and the sauce are one ingredient.

Starch water and acid emulsify; the sauce grips instead of pooling.

Heat from the pasta volatilises the leaf. Add it off the flame.

Toast it, then hydrate. The piperine binds to the cheese fat.

Butter carries it, starch holds it still. Anything else steals the smell.

Broken pasta and bean liquor thicken each other. Neither works alone.

Loosen with the starchy water or it clumps. That water is the eighth ingredient.

Spreadable fat melts on contact and turns the water into a chilli emulsion.

Black tagliolini: starch is the only carrier that takes ink evenly.

Fat clings to semolina better than any tomato ever has.

Oil and pasta water only bind if the starch is there to broker it.

Bloomed slowly in oil, it coats every strand and stays sweet.

Emulsified with starch water it turns to sauce with no cream involved.

Melted into the oil before the garlic goes in. It seasons the whole pan and disappears.

Egg pasta specifically; the yolk fat carries what water leaves behind.

Roe melts into oil off-heat; the pasta reads as cream that tastes of sea.

Oily fish and fennel over starch; Palermo has never rated it exotic.

Ground nut and milk makes a sauce with no cheese and more body.

Melted into butter and starch water it emulsifies into a sauce with no cheese.

Shaved cured roe over a simple plate is the same idea Sicily has for its own mullet, unclaimed here.

Bitter cocoa in a game ragu: it deepens the meat without adding sweetness.