Ten "Italian" foods you won't find in Italy

[Angela]

^^What ON EARTH does desperation have to do with it? Minced beef or pork or anything else is just MINCED beef or pork pieces. It has the same nutritional value, etc. etc. In Italy, especially, you buy your pieces of meat and watch the butcher grind it, or even grind it at home yourself.

Actually, in times past, even ragu alla bolognese was made with chunks of meat which were then shredded. In more modern times it just seemed like too much extra work for no benefit.

I've been to Venice a LOT since my cousin married a Venetian with ancestry back to the founding of Venice if you listen to him, and most of the pasta is dressed with fish of one type or another. The "Veneziana" is made with alici. They also make a duck sauce. Obviously, as you get further into the deep countryside they don't have access to much fish except for things like baccala or stoccafisso.

As for the Trentino Alto Adige, you'll eat more speck, kraut and sausage than pasta. The former is their traditional fare. What pasta there is is spaetzle other than a few other varieties which they adapted to the ingredients which were available.

See:
https://www.cucchiaio.it/cucina/cucina-tipica-italiana/trentino-alto-adige/

One of the only pastas I ever saw on their menus is this, unless it was set up for tourists, or was brought by incoming Italians, who have settled there in decent numbers.

https://www.cucchiaio.it/ricetta/ricetta-ravioli-magro-tirolese/

They also made pastas with cooked ham and cream. I never ordered them so I don't know what it actually tastes like...

In Treviso I remember a lot of pasta with radicchio, but that's one of the few vegetables I don't like because it's so bitter, so I didn't order it. I did like a pasta they made with pancetta, finocchio and rosmarino.

 

[davef]

Ah forget my previous post regarding these entrees, they look really good especially the ravioli Angela posted and I've had the bolognese numerous times. Btw I'm a huge ravioli fan and if the Tyrol version is stuffed with cheese, that makes it even better for a cheese mouse like myself!

Oh and yes Angela, I'll admit to ordering the fettuccini alfredo more times than I can count though it isn't the most exciting thing to eat (i ordered it when I used to go to Applebee's with friends bc I couldn't find any other pasta entry ).

Btw I would never touch a papa johns or anything served at that place you walked out of due to the bad acidic pasta sauce, I saw the photo and it was real icky looking; and based on other photos of that place, it seems to go way too far in terms of cramming stock Italian artwork and architecture so it can constantly remind you "LOOK! See?? IM an ITALIAN restaurant!! The most ITALIAN Italian RISTORANTE EVER!!" I guess it's a way to attract people from Idaho or wherever else there's next to nobody with Italian ancestry


And no I'm not saying incorporating Italian aesthetics in an ITALIAN restaurant is a bad thing, it's just how the restaurant as mentioned did it, i would say the same if an expensive Chinese restaurant did something similar (saying this so no one thinks I'm singling out Italians). Ill add that I've never even been there, I'm going off of the photos I've seen.

 

[halfalp]

Cent'anni ! italian food is the dope, i was also always wonder why bolognese in american movies looked like the sauce was some tomato sauce, the real ragu with the addition of milk is way more light in color not red. Unfortunately i never has the chance to go in Italy apart when i was young in camp 2 weeks in Faro near Rimini but we never eat localy, always the monitors would cook. What i found strange with spaghetti bolognese its their universality, do you know why ? I know spaghetti came from Napoli and Bolognese from Bologna but how it became so universal, like my mother was eating spaghetti bolognese in her childhood, but at this time they dont had TV, it was already known.

 

[davef]

I guess the reason it became popular is due to people going around recommending it. It could've been the Romans who introduced spaghetti bolognese to various locations across Italy but I'm not sure and I would have to look this up.

Another famous food item from bologna is one of my favorite sandwich meats...baloney!

 

[Pax Augusta]

I guess the reason it became popular is due to people going around recommending it. It could've been the Romans who introduced spaghetti bolognese to various locations across Italy but I'm not sure and I would have to look this up.

Another famous food item from bologna is one of my favorite sandwich meats...baloney!

Spaghetti alla bolognese is a dish for tourists and doesn't belong to the Italian tradition. Now you can even find it in Italy in some tourist restaurants who Italians avoid like the plague. The original dish is tagliatelle al ragù (from French ragoût). In Italy there are roughly two kinds of ragù, the Bolognese-like ragù findable in most of north and central Italy, with a lot of local variations, and the Neapolitan-like ragù more typical of southern Italy. The main difference between tagliatelle and spaghetti is the first ones are made with eggs and have a different form.

Fortunately not all the foreign tourists in Italy are like the average Disney's tourists. Especially British, Germans, French and Dutch like to explore the local restaurants (in addition to the restaurants in Italy there are also the trattoria, osterie...), and so it is not unusual at all to find British, Dutch, French and Germans in trattorias and osterias with no English-written menu exclusively frequented by Italians far away far from the most touristic places.

I could be wrong but I find that European tourists on average are much more curious than their American counterpart. Americans often settle for stereotypes. It is as if the Americans were looking for confirmation of what they already have in mind. But I think not all Americans are like that.

 

[Angela]

As has been said by Pax and half alp, there are big differences between spaghetti bolognese and tagliatelle with ragu' alla bolognese both in the type of noodle and how the sauce is made. You could never mistake the taste and texture of fresh tagliatelle made with eggs to spaghetti, or the two versions of the sauce either.

The English are guilty of this kind of thing too, however. Gino D'Acampo is a Neapolitan chef who used to regularly appear on an English morning show. He was constantly battling the English conception that the sauce should be some ground meat swimming in tomato sauce. He had the same issue with spaghetti carbonara, which they insisted on making with cream. The latter is a heavy dish but it doesn't have to be THAT heavy. Also, when you douse things with lots of cream you can risk making a dish bland and tasteless.

Look, I'm not some food Nazi. People can eat whatever they want, but they should know it's not the original, and they should know before traveling what they will and will not be able to get in terms of food. You're not going to get a lot of your "local" Chinese dishes in China either.

Southerners do make a tomato-meat sauce in which you basically simmer large cuts of meat and sausages in tomatoes and their juice for hours. They also make a "meat" sauce called "alla genovese", which is confusingly not like the meat sauce made in Genova. I included a picture of the latter upthread. This is their "tomato" sauce. It's sometimes called "gravy" by Italian Americans.

As for "baloney" versus the cured meat made in Bologna, which is called mortadella and may be my favorite cured pork product, words fail me.

 

[davef]

Im different, in that I like pasta smothered in cheese bc I'm a human mouse . The bolognese I ate a lot was covered in parmasean and I went as far as adding grated cheese on top lol. Hopefully my sister stopped eating that kraft macaroni and cheese garbage, she used to eat quite frequently (she even once made pasta with buffalo wings...I wonder if she's worse than me).

I don't care as much about authenticity as I do about whether its enjoyable to eat and isn't TOO unhealthy

 

[Sile]

^^What ON EARTH does desperation have to do with it? Minced beef or pork or anything else is just MINCED beef or pork pieces. It has the same nutritional value, etc. etc. In Italy, especially, you buy your pieces of meat and watch the butcher grind it, or even grind it at home yourself.

Actually, in times past, even ragu alla bolognese was made with chunks of meat which were then shredded. In more modern times it just seemed like too much extra work for no benefit.

I've been to Venice a LOT since my cousin married a Venetian with ancestry back to the founding of Venice if you listen to him, and most of the pasta is dressed with fish of one type or another. The "Veneziana" is made with alici. They also make a duck sauce. Obviously, as you get further into the deep countryside they don't have access to much fish except for things like baccala or stoccafisso.

As for the Trentino Alto Adige, you'll eat more speck, kraut and sausage than pasta. The former is their traditional fare. What pasta there is is spaetzle other than a few other varieties which they adapted to the ingredients which were available.

See:
https://www.cucchiaio.it/cucina/cucina-tipica-italiana/trentino-alto-adige/

One of the only pastas I ever saw on their menus is this, unless it was set up for tourists, or was brought by incoming Italians, who have settled there in decent numbers.

https://www.cucchiaio.it/ricetta/ricetta-ravioli-magro-tirolese/

They also made pastas with cooked ham and cream. I never ordered them so I don't know what it actually tastes like...

In Treviso I remember a lot of pasta with radicchio, but that's one of the few vegetables I don't like because it's so bitter, so I didn't order it. I did like a pasta they made with pancetta, finocchio and rosmarino.

I am no saying mince is inferior............I am saying in all my relatives in italy or australia, all my inlaws and their line they did not prefer mince over cubed pieces of steak..........I have never eaten mince meat rugu made by them.
Also, I rarely see napolitano sauce on pasta in my families.
If we are not eating a risotto, then the pasta is usually what I stated above.............Btw, we only ever had pasta once a week

My cousin drives to find bigoli for her duck ragu, that is her specialty

 

[halfalp]

I personnaly make my Bolognese with Minced Beef, first because i'm not a fan of Porc, even if a know that Minced Beef + Minced Pork gave a better taste ( the pork ) and secondly because original ragu is made with, idk the term in english ( i call it " Bouillie " in french ) but some part of the beef that takes 5-6 hours to cooked to remove the collagen and at the end, crumble the meat, a little like the cuban recipe Ropa Vieja, it takes a lot of times, personnaly, with only Minced Beef i dont like that it cooked more than 45 minutes, because after meat start to become crumbled and i dont like it when its minced meat.