How to Shop Like an Italian | Shopping Tips for Authentic Italian Cooking

hi i'm harper if ava's taught me one thing about italian food it's that real authentic italian food requires simplicity which therefore requires high quality ingredients ava's become quite the american master shopper so we thought that today we would take you on a little shopping trip of our own uh my understanding is that you have a dish planned for tonight and it's a surprise to me but we're gonna go to our usual haunts and maybe bring you along show you behind the scenes of how we do our shopping and maybe give you a few tips and tricks if you're making italian food at home so ava are you ready to shop till you drop yes let's go and yeah [Music] our first stop of the day is walmart why because pretty much everyone has one in their backyard and we're here to show you that if you know what you're looking for you can get some pretty good authentic italian food we are the section of pasta and i would like to give you some tips on how to decide which pasta you should buy here we have vanilla that i know is the most famous italian pasta but there is a reason why i don't buy burritos as you can see the color of the pasta is more it's closer to yellow and usually in italy we try to eat what we call bronze cut which means that the pasta is shaped by a tool made by brawls that give to the pasta a different color as you can see this is a more let's say white and when you touch while this one is very very smooth this is more rough and it keeps the sauce much much better than the other one this pasta is a very good pasta and you can understand that it's a good pasta because as we said before there is written bronze die cut is made by just by one ingredient as you can see and also the time of cooking it's in between 12 and 14 which means that it's a very well done pasta it's usually a pasta takes just like five minutes or six minutes to be cooked i don't really suggest it today i feel very lucky because i found this pasta at walmart that is one of the best italian pasta and this pasta is what we call in italy penne means that they are the smooth so they don't have the ridges like the other pen nobody but finish but today i want to take a risk so i decided that i'm going to cook with the pen alicia and give to them the honor that they deserve and as you can see it's even cheaper than barilla and all the rest of pasta so it's very good choice if you can have it [Music] how i choose my tomatoes to make my tomato sauce it has to be written as an ingredient just tomatoes so as you can see for example here we have ingredients tomatoes so i'm sure that is this is good for my tomato sauce then if i take this tomato puree water acidic acid onion powder garlic powder red pepper and then you have always this horrible taste of spice of herbs find one that is just tomatoes [Music] this always made me laugh a lot because we don't have italian seasoning we don't use all these herbs together just for one dish for example here there is written steering to marinara sauce and you can find one two three four five six seven herbs usually in the marinara sauce we put just basic here we have a good example how some company they don't do a very good job with people because cater is written organic extra virgin olive oil first called presto cara peli firanza so you are sure that this is 100 italian olive oil but then you turn the label and you read that this olive oil is italian portuguese indonesian so you are not buying for that price a real italian olive oil which doesn't mean that this is not good but it's not 100 percent italian and the same thing is this that is ultimate price and this doesn't seem italian but this is the same old olive oil that this when it comes to cheese it's better if you go in another grocery parmesan cheese this is not parmigiano-reggiano don't make this big mistake one thing is parmesan the other thing is this is not italian and i know that it's not real and healthy food but it reminds me one of the best sandwich that i have ever had in my life so if i have to cheat once again maybe maybe our second stop of the day is whole foods market now if you've seen this video before you know that when ava first came to america she was a little bit skeptical about whole foods and found some of the offerings to be strange i'm still skeptical but after giving whole foods a few chances she's come to realize that there are a few good things here one of the things that i really like to get here with foods is cheese in general because i found out that here they have a better selection of that at the local grocery shop [Music] every time that i'm here i never skip my smoke the mozzarella cheese and because i didn't expect that i could find this here it's a very good cheese that you can use in several ways you can eat by themselves you can use perfect pasta you can use in a salad i really recommend if you can to get this because it's very very good usually i get a good ricotta cheese now it's not real italian ricotta cheese that is the thing closes to my ricotta that i can find here in maine do ya is a calabrian product and it's a very soft salami with made by pork and just spicy pepper and all calabrian people we are proud of our wanduya but if you're here at wolf foods please skip this because believe me it's pretty horrible it has nothing to do with the real one so don't buy this never guys make your own it's much much better every time that i'm here at wolf foods i always buy italian wine because in the normal wine shop that you can find in all america the price is it's a pretty high price so here at wolf foods you can find a normal price for the american standard but with a good selection also of italian wine this is for example a very good wine it's a barbara dalba it's a doc that in italy this means that wine is a very good wine and also it's enough affordable because it's not so expensive i like red and white wine in the same way but i have my own rule when i choose the what wine usually i look for a wine that it has the 13 at least 13 percent of alcohol because according to my taste i prefer a stronger white wine it doesn't mean that white wine with 12 percent of alcohol is not good but for my days 13 to hop it's better this is one of my favorite white wine this is the one from campania regional as you can see is 13 degrees of alcohol and it is a dot as i said also for the red wine when you find this it means that the wine is a very good wine and it's not so much expensive because the price is just 15 for a button so maybe drink a little bit less but drink better never forget the real parmigiano-reggiano it's something that you should have always in your fridge our third and final stop for the day is this wonderful little local farm we're very lucky to have this practically in our backyard but pretty much no matter where you live you'll be able to find a farmer's market or something similar we can get fresh locally grown produce why is it important to buy fruit and vegetables from some place like this instead of a normal grocery store here they are for sure um pressure second thing is they are local which means also cheaper and the third thing is that they are in season the product that they offer is a seasonal product which means better has a taste and cheaper as i said before [Music] [Music] in southern italy we don't use a lot of squash but here we are in maine so as you can see they produce a lot of squash and different kinds so i always suggest to use what is local wood what is in season so we are going to use this wonderful butternut squash so we went to walmart we went to whole foods and we went to the farm we have everything we need right yes well i can't wait to find out what we're having for dinner and i can't wait to cook it [Applause] [Music] you [Music] sometimes you go and hunting hard to find all the things that you need but it happens that maybe you don't find everything but luckily we have amazon [Music] well after our day of shopping this is quite the nice-looking meal to sit down to a good ricotta cheese a wonderful butternut squash local parmigiano-reggiano some nutmeg onion olive oil the secret that is the amaretti cookies and the panelists it was worth the effort of going to three different places and making a little amazon order well thanks for coming along for our shopping today if you give this recipe a shot please let us know tag us in a picture on instagram pasta grammar we'll see you next time

Channel: Pasta Grammar

Views: 245,361

Keywords: how to shop like an italian food, authentic italian food, how to shop for italian food, how to find italian food, italian food shopping, italian food cooking, how to pick the right pasta, how to tell a good pasta, how to pick a good wine, italian wine, how to pick olive oil, which olive oil, tomato sauce, squash, how to shop, shopping tips, italian food, italian, italy, shopping, eva, harper, italian wife, smoked mozzarella, olive oil, vs, extra virgin

Id: 3SPI4x8Tzls

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020