Pasta PSA: Please Don't Buy Terrible Supermarket Fresh Pasta. Here's Why

If imported Italian dry pasta were choice A and fresh pasta were choice B and I could only choose one to eat for the rest of my life, there would be no contest. I'd choose A, dry pasta.

Many home cooks, bamboozled by the glut of fresh pasta in restaurants, have come to believe that if it's the chef's choice, then it's the better product. It is not.

Almost 30 years ago in "Pasta Fresca," the book I coauthored with Viana La Place, we talked at great length about fresh versus dry pasta and how one is not an inherently better product but each has unique attributes that work in differing roles. It makes me a little nuts that all this time later, and with so much culinary information shared by so many, the seduction of soft, yellowish noodles still pushes the wheaty aroma and meaty texture of high-quality dry pasta aside. Fresh pasta isn't better. It's a completely different thing, often tender and rich with egg.

These days you too often find restaurant "crafted," no-egg, extruded pasta that isn't skillfully made or is so improperly dried that it ends up being a mealy accompaniment to a well-made sauce. It ruins the dish — and the appetite.

To read more on the differences between fresh and dried pasta from the L.A. Times, click here.