I keep hearing about this rare and extremely difficult to make pasta, but one thing I always wondered is how good it actually is.
My feeling is that it's just an ok dish with a cultural legacy attached to it.
My feeling is that it's just an ok dish with a cultural legacy attached to it.
It's a common idea in the modern industrial world that there's still some artisan out there who makes something authentic and impossible to mimic.
But my parents who ran a restaurant could make a simulacrum of pretty much every kind of food they ever came across. And they weren't world experts with a long training at Michelin star restaurants, they had minimal training.
What did they they use their training for? Of course convincing people that they were making authentic Asian dishes in a western suburb.
One example is those really expensive fruit from Japan. If you look them up on YouTube the general consensus I've seen is that they're good but probably not enough to merit paying that much for them unless you're incredibly wealthy.
Anything that's actually really tasty or unique ends up becoming widespread and it eventually becomes reasonably affordable for anyone to try. One example of this is wagyu beef; at one time it was relatively rare and very expensive, but now you can find it in many asian supermarkets and a small cut is affordable for anyone.
Basically, would it be worth the Italy hike to get there, or can I get roughly the same thing at the supermarket?
For me "gamey mutton broth" is all I need to know. Yuck. Anything but mutton.